Youth
by Ignabar
Summary: Happosai is released from his imprisonment early, with repercussions reaching from a legendary training ground in China to a quiet Tokyo suburb... Not a day later, Ranma gets his wish to be able to defeat his pops. But the technique Happosai teaches him is more dangerous than anyone suspected. What if Ranma knew the Happo-Go-En-Satsu?
1. Masters and Apprentice

**I found this idea on a Ranma forum, posted by a user named Dumbledork. I don't think anyone's tried this yet, so I'll take a crack at it. Enjoy my first attempt at a masterpiece!**

XXX

Many years ago, one of the greatest martial artists in the world accepted two students. Eager learners, these men learned as much as they could from the diminutive, ancient man, but they soon realized their terrible mistake. Their master was an incorrigible pervert, and he'd survived through the years by siphoning off female ki from the unfortunate women around him. After the advent of silk undergarments in the late 1800s, it was he who'd coined the term 'panty-thief' after a particularly daring raid.

He was also a veritable slave driver. The two men who apprenticed themselves to this evil incarnate had hoped to learn the secrets of combat and success, but each of his lessons were imparted only after a long, bloody struggle and hours of backbreaking labour. Both usually involved women's undergarments to some degree. These two men became great and mighty, but at a steep price. One became emotionally fragile, a crybaby with distended tear ducts and no sense of responsibility. The other shucked morality and became much like what he sought to defeat in the first place.

The two decided that the menace of their Dread Master must come to an end, so one dark and rainy night, they hatched a plot to rid the world of him. After attaining mastery of their chosen art, the two bitter men laid in wait for their master, who was drunk and incoherent. One, to his eternal shame, masqueraded as a woman, and when his master attempted to grope him, inadvertently absorbed male ki. Stunned and disoriented by the abhorrent energy, the ancient man met his doom.

First, his mutinous apprentices bound his wrists and ankles, then wrapped him in male underwear and socks. _Frequently worn and unwashed_ men's underwear and socks. Their own, in fact. Then, wrapped from head to toe in the strongest cable and hung upside down in a vat of potent sake, the Dread Master was buried in a cave on a mountain and a heavy stone rolled over the cover.

Thus was Happosai, the Grandmaster of Anything Goes Martial Arts, banished by his own making. Genma Saotome married Nodoka Soh, and Soun Tendo married Kimiko Sanpei, and that was that. The next generation of Anything Goes, Kasumi, Nabiki and Akane Tendo, and Ranma Saotome, were free of the Dread Master's corrupting influence. There was one strand left, however…

Genma Saotome should have left well enough alone.

XXX

Genma hurled the last cat in the pit and did a double check of all the preparations. The fish sausages were carefully kept in a plastic container, to keep their smell from the starving felines in the pit. The lid was rolled off to one side, alongside a boulder large enough to resist attempts to remove the cover. A tranquilizer gun lay on a tree stump, ready and waiting in case the cats somehow managed to escape.

This time, his son _would_ learn the Neko-Ken. He'd poured too much money and time into obtaining that training manual, and even more in ensuring that Ranma would become the greatest martial artist of his generation. The ingrate little brat needed to accept that this was best for him. If Genma had noticed how close his smile just then resembled Happosai's, he would have slit his belly in shame.

That night, Ranma returned with a bounty of 'borrowed' fruits and meat, and Genma found himself chuckling in anticipation.

XXX

The field was covered with boulders, large and small, rolling inexorably downslope from a bluff overlooking the sea. It was a dark and silent night, and an ominous cloud obscured the crescent moon. Across the lonely plain a small breeze blew, and it carried a small pink piece of clothing snatched from a clothesline somewhere far away. A pair of panties, recently washed, was now heading to the worst place possible

One of the boulders, on a rather raised portion of the bluff, was inset too far in the hard earth to be a coincidence, and it was on this boulder that the panties daintily landed, the wind apparently having lost its steam. Behind it, concealed by thick stone and several hastily drawn ofuda pressed between the seams of the entrance, was a vat of sake. It was mostly empty, but enough remained that the upside-down mummified _thing_'s head was still submerged in the potent alcohol.

The presence of panties, and more importantly, female ki, overwhelmed the faded testosterone clinging to the boxers wrapped around the _thing_, and the ley lines running under the field shuddered. First, the string snapped, dropping it in the remaining few inches of sake in the barrel. The murky liquid, clouded by time, obscured the rest of the horrible process, but after not so long, an explosion of ancient power rippled outwards from the old cave.

The panties, which somehow survived untouched the destruction of their resting place, alighted in the withered and wrinkled hands of Happosai, who greedily devoured the life and colour of the thing until it was grey and shapeless, barely recognizable as underwear. He felt no hunger, no anger, no desire for revenge, only overpowering _lust_ to replenish his faded store of female ki.

Driven by self-preservation and the fervently burning wish to liberate more of his silky darlings, Happosai rocketed over the field in a display of vibrancy uncommon for his age, with only one thought on his mind: _'I'm baaaaaaaaack!'_

XXX

Soun Tendo abruptly stopped crying. Crying was his way of coping with almost any emotional overflow, except one. What he felt now was pure, unadulterated _fear_. The last time he felt this was when…

Not even the recent death of his dear, beloved Kimiko could stop the stark terror that now infiltrated his soul. He got up from his futon, unable to sleep, and tiptoed his way to the kitchen for a snack. He passed Kasumi's and Nabiki's rooms, but Akane's was empty. Soun felt his heart skip a beat, and he rushed to the kitchen- where Akane was innocently munching on a cookie.

"Ah. You couldn't sleep either, eh?" he said, relief flooding him in waves. Akane looked at him guiltily, and offered him a cookie too. Soun took the proffered treat and ate it quickly.

"Thank you for teaching me Anything Goes," he daughter said, and Soun nearly choked on the crumbled pastry in his mouth. He had been planning to stop training his daughters in martial arts, in the wake of their mother's death, but something gave him pause. If Happosai was back, and it was certainly a possibility (Soun recalled, less than fondly, the many times that the four of them; he, Genma, Nodoka, and Kimiko, had tried to off the little bastard), then Akane should be able to defend herself. _All_ of them should be able to defend themselves.

"Akane," he said solemnly, and Akane regarded him with wide and vulnerable eyes, "I will make you the best practitioners of Tendo Anything Goes. All three of you. Now go get some rest, you have a long day ahead of you."

Akane left, and Soun raided every stash of sake, beer, vodka, wine, spirits, and other alcohol he had around the house, and poured all of it down the storm drain. Then, driven by a fit of humor, emptied the last into the koi pond. He'd need to be sober for the work to be done.

XXX

Quinghai province is a wild place, especially the northern reigions. Independent tribes wage subtle war on the People's Republic of China by declaring their independence in their homeland. A wellspring of magic and power, the rival tribes of the Musk and Joketsuzoku, each embodying the spirit of gender, battled over control of the sacred grounds.

In the hut of elder Ko Lon, the young warrior Xian Pu barely twitched in her sleep, but the Matriarch of the tribe bolted upright and leaped from bed, ready to fight to the death. That ki signature was unmistakably Happosai's, wich only meant one thing: _trouble_. Calming somewhat, Ko Lon reassured herself with the comforting truth that Happosai was far away, in Nihon, and even the Pervert couldn't travel so far so fast.

She looked down at her great-granddaughter, the hope and future of her village, and her eyes hardened. They would need to be prepared for the coming storm, and Xian Pu at her current level just wouldn't cut it. It was time to step up her training, to levels that rivaled her own. Only then would her line have any chance of surviving.

Xian Pu slumbered on, unaware that the wheel of fate was slowly turning to a less than favourable location, and that she was at the heart of the chaos.

Not so far away as some would have liked, the Patriarch of the Musk tribe looked upon his son Herb and thought much the same. Alliances would have to be made, trusts forged, if any were to survive the second coming of Happosai.

XXX

At first it was quiet, dead still, but only far a few seconds, and then _they_ came, biting and scratching and tearing and clawing away, the stench of cats in heat and foul urine soaking the dusty floor of the pit pervading his nostrils the way the feel of their teeth and sharp claws buried in his skin tortured his fragile sense of pain.

His clothes hung off him in tatters, two tendons slashed and a good many cuts already to infect with strains of disease carried in cat blood. They were fighting each other over the sausages now, the strongest amongst them waging war over the most delicious morsels, but the rest still picked and nipped at Ranma Saotome, whose pitiful screams ha now faded to quiet sobs of pain and terror.

It didn't just hurt anymore, not like training. Training was a _good_ kind of hurt, sore muscles becoming stronger and raw skin soothed by his pop's praises. But now, it burned like raked coals. Ranma had never felt so vulnerable and alone as when he could no longer stand and fight, when the swarm of those ca-_things_ knocked him down and stripped him of protection and skin.

Pops would come back, some part of him whispered quietly, he would come back and stop it this time as he had the first two, but another part of him, as his bare back and thighs were ravaged by sweeping paws, screamed that this was the end. He had tried to close his eyes, but it was like he couldn't anymore. Those yellow, demonic eyes were etched on the inside of his eyelids, tormenting him even when he shut them, and he _knew_ that they would haunt him forever, all of them.

The lid stayed firm after his first two tries at escape, and Ranma was dimly aware of two or three curious passerby trying to budge the massive thing, but none succeeded. Just as he faded into unconsciousness from lack of blood, a welcome escape from the pain, the lid was pushed off with a loud scraping sound. The cats shied away from the intruder, and strong hands lifted him from the pit floor, carrying him to safety. The last thing he saw was a green felt sack full of clothing, like the sort of thing Santa Claus might carry, and then he passed out.

XXX

He awoke some time later, the lines and scars on his body aching and agony twisting his gut. The guy who'd rescued him wasn't much bigger than he himself was, and he was busy pouring something foul in his lacerations. Iodine, or something like it, Ranma remembered, a tidbit gained from his pop… somewhere. The sack of underwear was nestled in a corner of the bland white room, smelling like old urine and washing detergent.

"You're awake, eh?" said the old man, rubbing the last of the disinfectant on Ranma's legs. "Who tried to teach you the neko-ken?" It was a display of mild interest that would shock those only passingly familiar with the legendary pervert, because very few knew that Happosai's weak point was children in distress.

"My pops did," said Ranma proudly, 'he's teaching me martial arts! I'm gonna' be the best in the world!"

Happosai laughed, a genuine laugh, mostly because that particular title currently belonged to him. "Kiddo, I can teach you things your daddy can't even _imagine_! If you want to help me, I can help you be the best martial artist in the world." He needed a successor to Anything Goes, and what he'd seen since escaping suggested that practitioners of the Art now settled for _much_ lower standards.

"I'm not sure I wanna be the best anymore," Ranma said quietly, shuddering at the memory of the pit. "I just wanna be able to beat my pops."

"I can do that too," Happosai said, the old fire burning in his eyes again, "I can do that too."

XXX

_Ranma's Journal: Day 1_

_Pops told me to get rid of my old journal a few weeks ago. Said diaries ain't manly or sumthin. Lucky Grandpa wants me to keep one, so here I am. Grandpa's been teachin me Anythin' Goes, and hes even harder to please than pops! But I'm already way better than I was before I got thrown in the pit with the __cca-__ furry things. He wants me to do stuff for him tho, but its not to bad._

Ranma watched as Happosai buried himself in a set of rhododendrons, leaving only his balding head poking out. He gave Ranma the thumbs up, and the aspiring fighter squared his expression into something suitable pitiful and sad, and bit his tongue as hard as he could. Bursting into tears involuntary, Ranma raced up to the door and rang the doorbell repeatedly.

A woman answered, her face twisting into pity as she bent down to comfort the crying Ranma. "It's-it's my dada," Ranma sobbed, aware that he was probably laying the little kid act on a bit thick. "He was in a car accident, and I need to call someone!" As the woman was reassuring him that everything was going to be okay and of course he could use her phone, Happosai leaped out from the bushes and knocked the woman unconscious with a judicious flick to her forehead.

"See, that's how you take someone out, boy," he enthused, "and now we take her panties and bra and leave."

"Neato, Grandpa!" Ranma said as the old master rifled expertly under the woman's clothes and retrieved both sets of her undergarments. "Lovely things, these," Happosai reminisced, rubbing the bra on his cheek. "I almost forgot." They ran away soon after, Ranma lagging somewhat as Happosai examined his armful of lingerie on the run.

XXX

Genma was starting to get worried. Ranma had been gone for nearly a week, and still no sign. Maybe the neko-ken had worked, and he was just off experimenting with his newfound invincibility. He certainly _hoped_ that was what was happening; otherwise Nodoka would have his head- literally.

_Ranma's Journal: Day 6_

_ Grandpa's sorta weird sometimes, and we still run around like I did with pops, but I'm strong enough to lift a bicycle now! Whatever Grandpa's doin, it works real fast. The trainings like what pops did, but Grandpa's better than pops. After we train in katas and spar a bit, he pokes me everywhere a couple times. I dunno what for, but it doesnt hurt at all, and afterwards I feel kinda funny._

_ Yesterday, we went to the park in Yoshinogawa, and Grandpa showed me a way to throw someone bigger than me. I wanna sleep now._

Happosai was convinced that Ranma was exactly what he needed in an heir. He was pliable, talented, and, he suspected, the son of his former student Genma Saotome. Oh, how the fates had shone on him, to give him a student with all that raw ability and none of the stubbornness. Nevertheless, Happosai never reneged on a promise, and he'd promised to give Ranma the ability to defeat his father.

It was just a question of how to do it. Like it or not, Happosai had trained Genma well, and almost nothing could overcome the barrier of two decades of hard training. Ranma, sadly, wouldn't be his that long. It was a conundrum…

At that moment, the way to solve the problem of time and the problem of his promise presented itself to him at the same time. It was sheer brilliance, like all of his ideas. Happosai rooted around in his bag of underwear and pulled out his own journal. Unlike Ranma's, his contained every martial arts and moxibustion technique he'd ever created. If only he could find it.

XXX

_Ranma's Journal: Day 8_

_ Grandpa didn't go out today to get more underwear. I asked him why he uses women underwear, but he just laughed at me. Today, I'm gonna learn about Moxibustion, whatever that is. He said it was a bunch of places you can poke people do make them do stuff. Maybe he's gonna teach me how to beat pops?_

_..._

_Nah, its just rememberin stuff. Grandpa says I gotta remember the basic stuff before I can learn the good points. That's okay, I can wait._

Ranma would never guess that Happosai's lessons in acupuncture were mostly to refresh his own memory on the topic. They were making steady progression in Anything Goes and panty stealing, although Ranma took more readily to the former than the latter. As Genma searched desperately over the island of Shikoku for his errant son, Ranma made more progress under the Dread Master's learned guidance than six years with Genma's tutelage.

XXX

_Ranma's Journal: Day 24_

_ Yeah! Grandpa said that he was gonna teach me the ultimate technique today!_

Happosai rented a room from a nice-ish family with a large house but hard up for money, in preparation for the process. He deposited his sack of worldly goods in a corner of the loft and spread some garbage bags around to catch anything that might need to be caught. Finally, he retrieved the sleeping Ranma from his hiding place among the panties. Happosai couldn't really fault him; he had slept much the same way many a time on the road. It was also convenient, in that he wouldn't have to explain why a boy had come in but no boy had come out to the kind people downstairs who didn't have a sense of charity regarding their silky darlings.

He stripped Ranma of his shirt and pants, leaving him in just a pair of ratty briefs in the middle of the sea of garbage bags. Happosai inhaled the scent of a bra to steady his hand and calm his nerves, and withdrew a needle that would have made Ranma pass out in fear had he seen it. He was only going to get one shot at this…

_Ranma's Journal: Day 25_

…

_Ranma's Journal: Day 26_

…

_Ranma's Journal: Day 27_

…

XXX

_Ranma's Journal: Day 39_

…

_Ranma's Journal: Day 40_

…

_Ranma's Journal: Day 41_

…

XXX

_Ranma's Journal: Day 53_

…

_Ranma's Journal: Day 54_

… _iwaasasohma…_

_Ranma's Journal: Day 55_

…_ifelbertbumstomhhusanarmshev y…_

_Ranma's Journal: Day 56_

_ I don hurt as much as I did yesterday. I can fell my toes again, and there ain't blobs of red everywhere I looked. Grandpa was so proud of me! I actually did it, whatever it is, but he wont tell me yet. I feel funny though. Maybe this is what its like to master a legendary technique? I dunno._

_ I miss pops. He must be worried sick, lookin for me all of Japan. I'll ask Grandpa if we can go look for him too, after I can stand up without fallin over._

XXX

Genma was on the verge of loosing all hope. His son was still gone, and he'd finally got around to reading the second page of the training manual for the cat-fist. "Just another technique that would only be used by a total idiot!" Had he really driven off his son for good? That lazy kid should be thankful that he was going to become a world-class martial artist, not run from the chance like a scared little girl.

He ordered another drink. It was hopeless, all hopeless. His dreams of joining the schools and retiring as the master of Anything Goes were shattered alongside Ranma's memory, and Genma had a long history of finding solace in the bottom of a cup. The bar was empty save him and an overweight bartender who knew him by name and wished he didn't. All was quiet and serene, save the general despair pressing up against Genma's heart like a cold caress.

"Hello again, Genma."

Silly Genma, of course it can get worse. Genma's heart stopped midbeat at the sound of that dry, cracked voice. His mind clicked into overdrive as he scanned the bar frantically for easy exits and potential weapons. The bartender looked up casually, saw who was standing there, and went back to frantically polishing the shot glass in his hand to a shining finish.

_'He's gone, that can't be him, me and Soun finished him off back that one time when he was too drunk. It's not possible, why does this always happen to me?'_

"D-d-d-dread Master!" he squeaked, not turning around in case it wasn't really Happosai.

"Hiya pops!" came another voice from behind him, and several thoughts went through Genma's head at the same time.

_'Ranma's safe!'_

_ 'Ranma's with Happosai.'_

_ 'What did Ranma _do_ with Happosai?'_

"Ranma!" he exclaimed, turning around to hug his son. He inevitable missed and ended up scratching at the dusty floor. When he looked up, he noticed that Ranma was holding a 5-yen coin, and was aiming it at him. A cocky grin was plastered over his adorably smug little face. The centre of the coin, a round hole surrounded by decorative markings and specifications, glowed sinisterly.

"Happogoensatsu!"

**Wow. I'm not really sure where this is going, but damned if the journey isn't the destination!**

**-Ignabar**


	2. The Exact Opposite of Ranma Saotome

**Ten Years Later…**

"One!"

"Hiyah!"

_Snap_

"Two!"

"Hiyah!"

_Snap_

"Three!"

"Hiyah!"

_Snap_

The Tendo dojo was a flurry of activity. It was a rainy day outside, and Akane had suggested to her father that they do another four-way sparring session. Their warmup consisted of breaking pine boards to the timing of Soun's command, after which Kasumi, Nabiki, Akane, and Soun Tendo, each wearing a light blue gi tied with black belts, gathered in the centre of the spacious training hall and bowed to each other.

Nabiki struck first, piling a hard attack on Akane, who stood her ground and matched her older sister blow for blow. This left her back open to Kasumi, who pressed Nabiki on her other side. It became a war on two fronts for the middle sister as she held off Akane and Kasumi with one hand each. A few of Akane's blows powered their way past her guard and delivered welts of Nabiki's face and shoulder, and that was when Soun attacked Akane from _her_ other side.

As Akane found herself facing an opponent better than her, Nabiki was left open to engage Kasumi. By themselves, it was almost no contest, and Kasumi barely managed to hold off Nabiki's furious blows until Akane dropped to the floor on her back and flipped their father and sensei into Nabiki with both hands.

Now Nabiki was on the floor, buried under her father and Akane, who had leapt on top and was raining blows on Soun's head. Kasumi bent over and gently pinched Nabiki's nose closed and put her other hand on her mouth. Nabiki's face turned red, then blue, and she was forced to tap out. Soun wriggled his hand into a solid grip of Akane's gi and threw her sideways, rolling off himself, and Nabiki scuttled away on all fours to watch the rest of the fight.

Kasumi was down next. Akane grabbed her shoulders and used her as a shield for Soun to fight around. She twisted and headbutted Akane's forehead, but her youngest sister weathered the hit and Kasumi was taken out by a backfist from Soun while she faced away. Akane put her down, and Kasumi gratefully stumbled to the wall and sat down next to Nabiki. This was easily the best part: waiting to see which of them would come out victorious.

Akane squared up against her father, panting heavily where he was relatively calm. "Hiyah!" she screamed, launching an ill-fated final attack that seeked to penetrate the eldest Tendo's iron defense, but he managed to block, duck and dodge every shot. Only one hit got through before Akane was too tired to go on, but it was hard enough to make Kasumi wince. Soun rubbed his thigh appreciatively, and Akane capitalized by kicking high. In an embarrassing final move, Soun grabbed her ankle and hoisted her off the floor entirely. She hung suspended by one foot, conscious that struggling would drop her on her head. Nabiki snickered.

"Well done, all of you," Soun approved, "you've come very far in the past couple months. Nabiki, you need to stop attacking first, especially when doing so will put you at such a great disadvantage. Kasumi, that wasn't very sporting of you. A simple tap would have sufficed to incapacitate your sister." Kasumi coloured, but took the advice anyways.

"Akane, you're strikes are powerful, but they lack speed and precision. We'll need to work on that next time."

"Yes, sensei," Akane said, referring to Soun as her teacher, rather than her father. It annoyed him somewhat, and he knew it was because she was annoyed herself. A defeated Akane was an uncharitable Akane. It would make the next order of business that much harder.

"All right, clean up everyone. I need to talk to you all in the kitchen in a few minutes."

Kasumi, minutes, was preparing a tray of sandwiches at the counter, while Nabiki looked over the revenue from Anything Goes classes at the table. Akane walked in and sat down next to her, a stack of mail in her hands. "Daddy's already gotten the mail," she said loudly, "so this must be about…"

"What? Pretty much anything could come in the mail," Nabiki countered. "Maybe you're right, but that doesn't say much."

"Settle down, this is important," Soun admonished from the doorway. Taking a bite from a sandwich, he threw a postcard on the table. It read:

_Soun. Coming soon. Bringing Ranma. Genma._

"Daddy, what's going on?" Akane asked suspiciously.

"Eh-heh… You see, Genma and I are good friends, and many years ago, we made a pledge to join the two schools of Anything Goes, Tendo and Saotome, by marriage. When Ranma gets here, one of you will marry him, and our dojos will be combined once and for all."

"Daddy, that wasn't very responsible of you," Kasumi said. "What if this Ranma isn't, ah, proper marriage material?"

"He's going to be a pervert, I just know it," said Akane, bluntly.

"You think _all_ boys are perverts" Nabiki drawled. "I don't know, maybe if he's handsome…"

"Well, I will let the three of you decide amongst yourselves who will fulfill our pact."

XXX

Out in the dark, rainy streets, people stopped dead at the most ridiculous thing any of them had ever seen. The main street was empty, clearing the way for a panda, of all things, to run as fast as its legs could carry it, pursued by a young girl with bright red hair, wearing ill fitting clothes.

"Come back here, old man!" she shouted shrilly, and the panda responded by turning and casting its eyes down in a facsimile of shame. It shuffled back to the little fiery-haired girl, but just as it neared it whipped out a wooden sign that read "A-HAH!" and clubbed her over the head with it. Slinging her over its shoulder, the Panda lumbered on, now carrying new cargo.

It turned into a residential neighborhood and knocked on the door to a certain old house in the Nerima neighborhood. It was answered by a girl of sixteen with long, dark blue hair. She looked at the panda. The panda looked back at her, expectantly. Akane Tendo screamed and slammed the door shut, running back into the house. "There's a wild panda bear out there," she shouted hysterically, "and it has a little girl!"

The door reopened, this time by Soun Tendo, who leveled a fierce gaze at the furry creature resting on his porch. The panda whipped out another sign from Kami-knows-where, this one reading "Soun! My old friend!" The panda rotated the sign. "Won't you let an old friend in?" It flipped again, and somehow, the first side now read "I need some hot water, please."

"Genma?" Soun said in disbelief. The panda nodded and stepped through the doorway. The girl's head clunked against the frame as the panda shouldered its way past Soun and into the living room, where it deposited her on the floor none too gently.

"May I have some hot water, please?" yet another sign read, and Soun wondered where the thing that claimed to be Genma was getting the things. _'Some things are best left to the imagination,'_ he decided. "Of course Mr. Panda," Kasumi said from the kitchen, "I was just making tea for our guests when you arrived."

The panda grasped the proffered kettle and dumped some of the boiling water on its head. The steam cleared, revealing the form of an paunch old man wearing a ratty old gi and a dirty bandana to hide his baldness. "Soun, old friend!" exclaimed Genma, "I've arrived with Ranma at last!"

The girl on the floor twitched. In fact, everyone twitched. Ranma was supposed to be a teenage, virile male, whereas Genma had brought with him a six-year-old girl. Almost the exact opposite of what Ranma ought to be. "Genma, are you _sure_ this is…" Soun trailed off.

"Yeah, I'm Ranma," said the girl, peeling herself off the floor. "I know, being on the road can kinda dirty you up, but at least I'm learning the Art."

"You know martial arts too?" Akane said, her interest piqued in spite of the odd entrance. If anything could get her blood pounding, it was the prospect of a good fight. "Where'd you study?"

"Ah, here and there," Ranma answered evasively. "Pops and I got around a lot on my training trip."

"We have a dojo," mused Akane, "and all four of us have been certified to teach Tendo Anything Goes. Maybe we could spar, and I'll get a feel for how good you are."

"You two go have fun," Genma said dismissively, "I need to talk to Soun about the agreement we made." Nabiki abruptly stopped reading in order to eavesdrop on the conversation, and Kasumi innocently remained where she was, citing the necessity of making dinner as an excuse.

Ranma and Akane ran out the back door of the house, through the rain to the family dojo. It was a beautiful old building, Ranma observed, made of solid oak and done in a traditional style with high doors and a spacious interior. There was a rack of swords affixed to the back wall, and another wall had a line of mirrors installed along its length. It smelled like sweaty bodies, though.

"Do you have classes here often?" Ranma asked.

"Sure do. The general class was yesterday, and the advanced classes are on Wednesdays. You could join, if you want. Kasumi teaches kids like you, and I teach the older students."

"I'm not a little kid," Ranma said indignantly, folding her arms over her chest. "I'm sixteen, for crying out loud!"

"Yeah… right. Put your money where your mouth is, kiddo." Akane took a fighting stance facing Ranma. "First to three strikes wins, okay?" It was an old teaching trick, letting the student expend their energy while giving their sensei a feel for their ability, then correcting the obvious flaws by exploiting holes in their technique. Ranma stood sideways and faced the taller girl, balling her hands into fists.

"First to three, got it," repeated Ranma, and she ran the distance between them. Akane noticed that she left her guard up, something street fighters rarely did. Not much indicator, other than that Ranma had at least _some_ training. Then the little girl somehow jumped from the floor over Akane entirely. Ranma tapped her head with one finger and fell to the ground in a roll. "Point me," she said confidently.

"Uh…" Akane muttered, "how… never mind." Raising her somewhat slack defenses, Akane cautiously approached her pint-sized foe, who was already charging again.

XXX

"Six months ago, Ranma and I were training in the Bayankala mountain range in China," explained Genma, "and we stumbled on a training ground on our way to a village of so-called female warriors. Jusenkyo Springs, it was called, because it was a series of hot springs in the ground, with bamboo shoots growing everywhere across the valley floor.

"The point of the training was to fight on the bamboo stalks, and we did. Ranma got the first hit in, and I fell in a spring. Apparently," he said with a hint of bitterness, "those springs were _cursed_. Anyone who falls in takes the form of whatever drowned there thousands of years ago. Cold water activates the curse, while warm water undoes it temporarily."

"I see then," Nabiki said astutely, "so you must have fallen in a panda spring."

"Indeed, I now bear the curse of the Spring of Drowned Panda," Genma said theatrically. "I did not see Ranma again for some minutes, mostly because I was… _acclimating_ to the curse. But when I emerged from the spring, Ranma had fallen in one of his own."

"The Spring of Drowned Little Girl!" Soun finished.

"Oh my," said Kasumi, "you mean to say that my sister is now fighting a man of her age?"

"Not exactly…" Genma grunted, taking a sip of tea.

XXX

"How are… you… so fast?" Akane panted. Ranma had literally run circles around her, subverting the point of the exercise until _she_ was the exhausted one and Ranma had gotten the measure of her ability. Akane squared off again and reared back for a powerful kick to the head. If it had actually worked, she would have regretted it later, but as it was, Ranma simply bent over backwards at the waist, grabbed Akane's shin with both of her arms, and flipped.

Akane didn't know that. One moment she was attacking a little girl at the best of her capability, and the next her nose was crushed against the wooden floor of the dojo. It smelled like sweaty bodies too. _'That's it, there's something not normal about this kid,'_ Akane decided, pulling herself up.

"That was jujitsu," said Ranma. "It's good if you're fighting someone bigger than you."

"I _know_ what jujitsu is," Akane spat, "but how did you flip me?"

"There's a point of leverage just below your knee. I just grabbed there and twisted your foot. Point two for me!"

Akane, still on one knee, backhanded Ranma onto her butt. "And point one for me," she growled.

XXX

"So Ranma, in her cursed form, is a little girl. But he _didn't_ fall in the Spring of Drowned Little Girl?" Nabiki asked. "It was raining outside, so either Ranma fell in the Spring of Little Child and you lied about her gender, or he fell in the Spring of Drowned Girl, and he was already a midget. Which is it?"

"Very clever," Genma groused, "it was the Spring of Drowned Girl."

"That _is_ Ranma, right? Yours and Nodoka's son?" verified Soun, hesitantly.

"SOUN!" Genma thundered, "HOW COULD YOU EVEN ACCUSE ME OF PHILANDERING WITH AMAZON WARRIORS?"

"He never mentioned Amazons," Kasumi said quietly. Soun raised both hands in a gesture of peace. "I never- Genma, what is going on?"

Genma finished his tea, put the cup down, and looked longingly at the refrigerator. "Do you have anything stronger? This is a long, _long_ story…"

XXX

They were tied, two-two. Akane pushed down the niggling worry that Ranma was toying with her and began the final exchange. Ranma dodged easily around, under, and _over_ every strike, gradually leading Akane around the borders of the dojo. As her temper slowly got the best of her, Akane's blows became slower and stronger, and Ranma _eeped_ as one sailed past her head. The fighting was awkward, as Ranma wasn't even half Akane's height, tilting the punches on angle.

Another came for Ranma's head, and she grabbed the punch by the elbow and hauled hard. Overbalanced, Akane fell forward and faceplanted on the dojo floor behind Ranma. The petite fighter stepped on Akane's back and laughed triumphantly. "I _win_!" she said deliriously. "That never happens with pops."

_'There's something definitely strange about Ranma,'_ Akane thought. _'That wasn't a judo flip, she just grabbed and pulled. I was in a bad spot, but no kid can be _that_ strong.'_ Out loud she said, "Well done. Why don't you go clean up, and we'll move your things to the guest room."

Ranma hopped down and smiled at Akane sadly. Her red shirt was almost big enough for Akane herself, and her loose black pants were held around her waist and ankles by loops of twine. "I don't have any stuff."

XXX

"It was Happosai," Genma said in a fit of rage. "The Dread Master did this to my boy! _Why us, Soun_? We worked so hard to imprison that terror, and he came back just in time to haunt me. Why?" _'Why don't you have any beer?'_

"Explain, please."

"Well, it was just after Ranma turned six. The first time that is. It was ten years ago, about the time-"

"-that the master escaped, I recall," finished Soun. "Do go on."

"Yes, I had just finished my third attempt at trying to teach m'boy an invincible technique, but he just disappeared. I searched high and low, but he only showed up a month later, accompanied by Happosai himself. The Dread Master taught him things, Soun, things no one should be burdened to know.

"Ranma, you see, had a new attack. The Happogoensatsu. Remember that little girl, what's her name… Ninomiya?"

"Hinako Ninomiya… Soun said, the light dawning on him.

"_Precisely_, Soun. I went to great pains to keep him away from yen, but he managed to use just about any hole he could get his hands on. We swam to China shortly after that, but even in the wilderness, he constantly managed to best me. Happosai taught him some type of acupuncture, because he just _knew_ all the pressure points to disable me. Even after they stopped working on me, and I was able to resume the training," Genma's voice lowered, "that was when the real horror began."

"You mean the age thing?" Nabiki asked.

"The pathways that the Happogoensatsu uses somehow stopped Ranma from ageing," Genma stated grimly. "Just like Ninomiya, he's trapped at age six forevermore."

"Genma," Soun said gingerly, "how long has it been since Ranma actually _used_ the Happogoensatsu?"

"I went to great pains to keep him away from objects with holes for the last few years. It was the only way to get any teaching done. I'd say, maybe since he was eight or nine. Why do you ask?"

"Well, because every time Ninomiya used it, she got older by a few years…"

XXX

Ranma doused herself with the bucket of cold water and stepped in the steamy water of the furo. He watched himself in curiosity as he changed from female to male again in the space of less than a second. It didn't bother him all that much, not like it did his pops, but he suspected that his curse was going to make problems for them all down the line.

It was good to be clean again. The two Saotome's didn't bathe very often on the training trip, but every time they did, Ranma felt refreshed. With a sigh of relaxation, he sank into the water further. It came up to his chin and a bit further, but he wasn't going to let that ruin his enjoyment. Biting the bullet, he dunked his whole head in the hot water, soaking his now-black pigtail. The feeling was like the leadup to a headache, and if he stayed there for too long, it might become one.

The only thing left to do was explain his curse to Akane and the other two nice girls. Ranma wasn't really sure how he wanted to go about doing that, but best to get a head start on thinking. The door opened, and Akane stepped in, wearing only a towel. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said automatically. "I didn't see the sign on the door. Say, wasn't your hair red a few minutes ago?"

"Yeah, I figure it was," replied Ranma. The voice difference between his two forms wasn't big enough to be noticeable, if you weren't looking for it. He stood up to grab a bucket from the edge of the furo, and Akane saw… well, evidence that Ranma was decidedly _not_ female.

For the second time that day, Akane was running and screaming down the hallway, this time pursued a young boy wearing only a pair of pants that he was continually tripping over. "Hey, come back here, you have my shirt!" Ranma shouted after Akane, whose only reply was "Pervert!" and a mad dash around the corner into the kitchen, where she rifled through one of the drawers before pulling out a knife.

"Geez, I just want my shirt back," Ranma said with a frown, "and you overreact like this? The furo's open, if you want it."

"You creep, you saw me naked!" Akane said accusingly, leveling the paring knife at the boy standing in the doorway.

"I put up the occupied sign, and you just barged right in," Ranma said sheepishly. "How is that my fault?"

"It's okay for two girls to bathe together, but you're a boy. And all boys-"

"-are perverts. Yes, dear sister, we've heard your litany before," Nabiki cut her off. "But we have something we want to try with Ranma here."

She withdrew a five-yen coin from her pocket and thrust it into Ranma's hands. "Use the technique the Master taught you," Genma urged. "It may solve all of our problems at once." _'And fulfill my end of the agreement,'_ he added silently.

"What tech- oh. You told me never to use that again, pops," accused Ranma. "Said it was bad for my training or something."

"I changed my mind," Genma growled, "now do it!"

Sighing, Ranma aimed the coin at a thoroughly confused Akane, his face furrowing in concentration. "Happogoensatsu!" It felt like she had run a marathon, something Akane hadn't done in years. Her legs felt like soft jell-o, her muscles relaxing like at the end of a hard workout, but without the fierce burn, and her thoughts became sluggish. The knife slipped out from between nerveless fingers, and Akane's head lolled back. Apparently, even a small amount of siphoned ki was difficult to acclimate to. Kasumi rushed over to steady her.

Her body exuded a white mist, which gathered in a funnel and rushed to the hole in the coin Ranma carried. It swirled through like water flushing down a toilet, and Ranma _grew_. He wasn't wearing a shirt, but his pants were suddenly stretched too far to cover his legs, and where there once was smooth flesh, Ranma was now muscled and older. In short, concluded Soun, exactly what he was supposed to be.

"Excellent, Ranma," he boomed jovially. "These are my daughters. My oldest daughter, Kasumi, and she's nineteen. This is my middle daughter, Nabiki, and she's seventeen. And of course, you've already met Akane, and she's sixteen. Pick any one you like, and she's yours!"

Ranma glanced down at his much larger body, up at Soun, then Genma, then Akane, who was struggling to pick herself up off the counter after having her ki drained. "I dunno," he said thoughtfully. "Does it matter?" Akane, already faint, had suffered enough. Her eyes rolled up in her head, and she fell into Kasumi's iron grip.

"Give me my yen back," Nabiki said eloquently, taking the coin without waiting for a response and stalking off. "Leave me out of this one," she called over her shoulder.

"Father, it is my dearest wish to serve out family honour, but…" Kasumi struggled for the right words. "I'm really not comfortable with pedophilia!" she blurted out.

"What's that?" Ranma asked, still looking himself over and prodding his extremities, as if to reaffirm that they still existed. Genma planted his face in his open palm, and Soun sweatdropped.

"Uhhh, what happened?" Akane asked groggily, wearily pulling herself to her feet.

"I think I'm engaged," Ranma supplied, and the pittance of ki he had sucked from Akane promptly ran out, returning him to his six-year-old form. Halfway through the sentence, his voice rose two octaves, and he began drowning in his oversized sweatpants.

Soun nudged Genma. "This is going to be a _long_ battle."

"Agreed, Tendo. Perhaps a game of shogi, to take our minds off of such things?"

"An excellent idea, old friend. My old board is in the closet…"

They walked off, leaving Kasumi to wonder if perhaps anything good could come from this as Akane, incensed, whipped out her trusty mallet and went for Ranma's head.


	3. Samurai Pedophile

Ranma didn't feel enthusiasm for the idea of school in the slightest, but his pops and Soun had been insistent. Before he knew it, not five minutes after waking up, he was dressed, ate breakfast, had a lunch shoved in his hands and was dragged out the door by Akane. "Lemme go, I can run just fine by myself!" he protested.

"Sure you can, squirt," Akane snickered, shifting her grip and speeding up. Whatever you could say about her temper, Akane could run like the wind, and Ranma was struggling to stay on his feet. He caught fragments of her muttered grievances drifting past, and tried all the harder to keep up with his potential fiancé.

They rounded a corner; the school coming into sight, and an old lady with a ladle splashed the two of them with cold water. Ranma felt an uncomfortable shift in her pants, and she dug her heels in. "Akane! We need to go back to get hot water."

Akane mulled it over on the fly. On the one hand, they were already running late, but on the other, it was probably best if Ranma's social problems pertained to just her age, not gender. Making an executive decision, she took an errant left at the next intersection and darted into a chiropractor clinic.

"Wait here, I'll be right back," she told her charge, and Ranma seethed by the door while Akane ran into the back room for a kettle. Shortly afterwards, Ranma felt a vague feeling of being watched, and dared to defy Akane by wandering a few feet into the practice.

"Hello there," came a voice from behind her, and Ranma turned to come face-to-face with a human skeleton. She screamed and jumped backwards, and the man propping the skeleton up roared with laughter. "I really shouldn't get my jollies from scaring little girls," he managed to choke out, "but it's just too cathartic!"

"Now more annoyed and embarrassed than scared, Ranma snorted in derision. "I am _not_ a little girl!" she protested, and Akane chose that moment to throw the contents of a teakettle on Ranma's head. He shuddered at the intense heat coming from the water, and wondered why it was always boiling. Lukewarm would do, but _every time_…

"Oh! Hello, Dr. Tofu," Akane said, reverting to a somewhat shyer demeanor. "We really must be going, can't stay to chat today."

"Did you really just become a boy?" Tofu asked, surprise registering on his face, but Ranma was already out the door, not under his own propulsion.

The school loomed, and Akane finally let Ranma's hand go. He skidded to a stop, gasping for breath, but Akane was still going. Ahead, a crowd of thirty of forty boys armed with hockey sticks and baseball bats milled aimlessly, but the arrival of Akane galvanized them into a shuffling charge in her general direction.

Normally, her refrain would have been something along the lines of "It hate boys!" as she met them in the most ridiculous skirmish known to man, but Akane was tired and slightly peeved from having to bring some random kid with her to high school. Instead, she just waded into the melee, book bags and fists flailing. In a matter of seconds, all of them lay on the ground, unmoving. Ranma's mouth fell open.

"My fierce tigress," the last boy in the schoolyard declared, "such boorish lot are beneath you! Defeat me, and I shall allow you to date me!"

Ranma approached, a little wary, as Akane dropped her bags on the ground and squared off against Tatewaki Kuno. The kendoist raised his bokken in a defensive position, but Akane leaned backwards and kicked the glorified stick into his chest. Kuno stumbled backwards, reaffirming his guard in a slightly more offensive position, and struck.

The majority of his blows were falling vertical, and Akane weaved between nearly all of them. She got a few opportunistic blows as her delusional opponent, but on the whole, it was nearly an even fight. Feeling slightly peeved at having been brought kicking and screaming all this way only to have Akane create so much of a roadblock, Ranma tried to go past the fight. The operative word is _tried_.

"Hey Akane, come on! You said we were gonna be late, and we will if you don't just leave this guy and get in the school." Suddenly, Ranma found his passage barred by a length of wood, Kuno giving him an evil eye.

"Who are you, who speaks so familiarly with the beauteous Akane Tendo? Wait, is it not customary to- Hey?" For once, Kuno's pompous manner of speech deserted him as Ranma reached up and gave him a stiff poke. "Nothing, do go on," he said innocently.

"Very well, my name I shall give! I am the captain of the kendo club, undefeated star of the kendo world. I am Tatewaki Kuno, but my peers call me the Blue Thunder of Furinkan High!"

Ranma faked a yawn. "Very impressive, but I think Akane just wants to go to class."

"My question stands, who are you, and why dost ye speak with the lovely Akane in such a base fashion?"

"I'm Ranma, and I live in her house now. Anything else?"

Kuno's legs gave way. One moment he was structurally sound, the next his foundations were swept away by a tsunami. The impact with the ground loosened his grip on his weapon, which spun away on the ground, and Kuno found himself face down in the dirt, unable to move himself.

Ranma inspected his handiwork critically. "Still got it," he murmured. Akane had long since vanished into Furinkan, delighted in the distraction. Kuno stayed silent for all of five seconds, and then burst into full rant mode.

"Foul demon! By what dark means have you ensnared the noble Tatewaki Kuno, vile sorcerer? What evil grip on the fertile minds of the Tendo clan have you that they grant you shelter from heaven's wrath? By all that is holy, I swear vengeance on you, _Ranma_."

"Right…"

XXX

Ten minutes later, Ranma was standing in the hallway with a pair of buckets, along with Akane, who had the same punishment. He wasn't especially happy with the way it had turned out, but anything was better than the mind-numbing boredom of English class.

"We weren't even late," he said aloud to himself.

"Oh yes, we were late. Not only were we late, but I got stuck with the thankless task of explaining that 'this may or may not be my fiancé, who is also a girl, and is not six, however much he may look like he is.' _Then_ we got thrown out of class."

"Why were you fighting those guys, anyway?" Ranma asked, puzzled.

"Long story. A year ago, that Kuno guy asked me out on a date, and I said no. The next day, he gave a speech to the entire school about how anyone who wanted to date me had do defeat me, and every pervert in the school interpreted it as 'you can have sex with Akane if you beat her up.'"

"Harsh."

"Yeah, no kidding."

There was an uncomfortable silence. Ranma was lost in thought, and Akane stared out the window, mildly uncomfortable with the situation and the heavy buckets in her hands. "How did you get away from Kuno?" she asked, finally.

"A pressure point. It disables your legs for half an hour or so, but it takes a minute to start working. I learned it from grandpa, while he was teaching me the Happogoensatsu."

The name of the technique made Akane wince in remembrance. "Who's your grandfather?"

Ranma shook his head. "He's not really my grandpa. I just called him that because his real name was a bit difficult to say right. His real name was Happosai. Apparently, he's the current Grandmaster of Anything Goes."

Exactly thirty minutes and twenty seconds after he was initially reduced to crawling along on his belly, hand over hand, Tatewaki Kuno bolted to Akane's homeroom as fast as his newly restored mobility could afford. Ranma ran his hands down his pants in search of spare change and came up short. He was very likely screwed the minute Kuno realized that the pressure point was only good for once a day or so. Enough time to eat dinner in peace without a panda breathing down your neck, but probably a bad choice in a fight.

"I, Tatewaki Kuno, demand that the swine Ranma submit to a rematch in view of his use of dark magic to cowardly resolve a match between two men. Face me, and I shall destroy thou, unholy demon!"

_'Kuno is a moron,'_ Akane thought disgustedly. _'He gets beaten by a kid, and swears vengeance for the slight of losing to someone. I guess the pressure point was a bit underhanded, but for crying out loud, he's twice Ranma's age. Anything Goes…'_

"Not here," Ranma insisted. "There isn't enough room inside. Follow me!" He dropped both buckets and ran off down the hall. "You run from our fight?" Kuno cried, giving chase. Ranma got to the end of the hallway and pushed open a window.

"Ranma, don't! This is the…"

He jumped out. Kuno, being the moron that he was, went right after him. There was a small splash, followed by a much louder splash as the two bodies hit the school's outdoor pool.

"… third floor…" Akane finished. _That_ got someone's attention, and suddenly there was a stampede of Japanese students rushing to the window-lined southern hallway. Perplexed teachers followed in their wake, and a few of the pool maintenance people had called over bystanders, until the whole affair had an audience of eighty or so people. Akane, who had ran hysterically at the window the minute Ranma had thrown himself out, was pressed by the mass of bodies so hard that she was in danger of falling out as well.

Ranma and Kuno remained underwater for some time. Their dark shapes collided and dispersed in meaningless patterns, dispersed by surface reflection until their exchanges lost any coherence to the viewers. It looked rather like a shark trying to eat a fish, only the fish was as giving as good as it got. Nabiki must have been there somewhere too, because Akane started hearing people starting cashing bets on how long it would be until there was blood in the water.

Ranma surfaced first, her red hair darkened to a deep maroon by submersion, and hauled herself out onto the pool deck. Kuno came up for air shortly after, panting hard and sucking down great swallows like he'd been fighting for his life in the pool.

"Ju-just let me a-alone, will ya?" Ranma demanded between gasps, and Kuno shook his head.

"Nay, for to leave thee be is as to ignore the blooming of the rose in one's garden, for only whilst tending to its roots and trimming its thorns can the curtain between innocence and beauty be blurred into true perfection. My lovely pigtailed goddess, allow me to be your caretaker and lover on your journey to such astounding and divine loveliness."

Seventy eight people facefaulted, one laughed silently to herself as metaphorical yen signs popped up in her eyes, and one turned redder than her name and restrained herself from third degree murder in a high school. Kuno stood up on the pool deck and threw his arms wide in an inviting hug. Ranma looked at him, her expression unreadable, and kicked him in the shin. The kendoist's mouth opened in an 'o' of surprise, falling with a surreal slowness into the pool again.

XXX

Six hours by car south of Tokyo, a village of wooden huts was as deserted as any ghost town. If you knew what to look for, you'd see that nearly all of them were cowering in their humble (read: muddy and dusty) abodes. The reason becomes apparent as a massive, rampaging boar paces up and down the oiled lanes between farms and barns, searching for tubers to munch and people to crunch.

Not a stone's throw away, one of the most potent forces of destruction reached the edge of the bordering forest, leaving a trail of splinters and sawdust in his wake. He slowed abruptly, noticing the village, and decided to go and ask for directions. As he came upon the empty streets, he instinctively knew something was wrong, much the same way as the mutant boar knew instinctively a challenger had encroached on its territory.

An unstoppable force meeting an unmovable object, in the form of a skilled, vengeful martial artist and two tonnes of raging porker with halitosis.

Ryoga Hibiki unslung his umbrella and expanded his awareness, searching for the boar with hearing and scent. He didn't have to look long, as the massive swine appeared shortly afterward at the other end of the road Ryoga was on. It was a testament to the danger represented by the young fighter that the boar didn't attack immediately, but instead sized him up. Satisfied that it would not be much of a fight, the boar charged at the small yellow figure. A wide smile, crazed and bloodthirsty, split Ryoga's face, and he leveled his red umbrella at the monster.

The villagers came out a few minutes later, not quite daring to believe that the kid had won, but there was no sign of the boar anywhere. One old man, the head of the town council, approached Ryoga with the intent of thanking him, but was instead accosted by his umbrella.

"You there, sir, please direct me to the city of Tokyo."

The man scratched his head. "It's, lemme see, a few hundred kilometers north of here. Just follow that road, and you'll get there in no time."

"Got it," Ryoga said, racing off into the western jungle from which he'd came. "Ranma Saotome, your reckoning is almost upon you!"

XXX

"That guy was an idiot," Ranma complained, and Akane found herself sharing the sentiment. Not only did Kuno have the gall to proclaim his love to a girl ten years his junior, he also believed that he could court both the 'blooming rose' _and_ the 'fierce tigress' at the same time. Akane had done her bet to cure him of the erroneous notion with her fists, but she had her doubts about their effectiveness.

"I know. Listen, I'm really sorry about nailing you with that baseball. It was an accident. I didn't even know they let you play in the first place."

Ranma sighed. It was the twentieth time they'd had this discussion. "It's fine, really. Doesn't even hurt anymore, see?" She tapped the wide bluish-black mark on her forehead and grinned. "If you really want to do something to make up for it…"

Akane perked up considerably.

"… can you get some hot water for me? Being a girl feels a bit like being squished into a box that's smaller than you are, and having a vagina is uncomfortable."

Swearing under her breath about misogynistic pandas and piglets, Akane left the baseball field to get some hot water from the girl's change room. Ranma sat by herself on the field, scowling at anyone who went past. One such person was Nabiki, who sat down next to her and rummaged in her pocket.

"Here, you should have this," she said, producing the five-yen coin from the day before and pressing it into Ranma's chest. "This is a freebee, so don't expect any more money related favors from me any time soon, okay?" Ranma nodded and pocketed the doomsday weapon, and Nabiki quickly vacated her presence.

Her logic was simple. Ranma was the underdog in any fight she got into, but with the ability to suck out someone's life, she could stack the odds against her and make a fortune. It was foolproof, particularly because nobody would bet on a little girl in a fight. The results weren't going to make her popular, but that was okay. Nabiki wasn't called the Ice Queen of Furinkan high for nothing.

She watched from a distance as Akane returned to Ranma carrying a kettle. They said some things she couldn't hear, and Akane slammed the kettle into his head, spilling some on him in the process. Now male, Ranma whipped out the coin and zapped her sister into a quivering lump of defenseless Akane, promptly becoming a properly attractive young man.

Her problem, Nabiki knew, was that being a mercenary bitch with the propensity to beat what was owed her out of the hides of anyone who bet more than they owned tended to scare the available boys off. Not only that, but most of the males at Furinkan were after her sister. Now she had a chance at this perfectly respectable, unbiased and (most importantly) ripped boy, but he had the unfortunate problem of being a kid most of the time.

He was trigger happy enough, though. Nabiki would normally have deferred the engagement to her little sister and wished them well, but despite Ranma's faults, she was ashamed to admit that she was getting a little bit desperate. The Ice Queen watched Ranma sling the immobile Akane over his shoulder and march off, probably to Dr. tofu's clinic, and smiled.


	4. Twin Sentinels

**Caution: Anything that might have misconstrued as cannon thus far ends in this chapter.**

Ryoga burst out from between a pair of hedgerows and onto the middle of a sidewalk, nearly bowling a boy in a student uniform over. "Excuse me," he said apologetically, "but I'm in a bit of a rush. Do you know where Furinkan High is?" The student pointed mutely behind Ryoga at a signboard proclaiming that this is 'FURINKAN SECONDARY SCHOOL'. Ryoga nearly fainted in joy, giving the student time enough to escape his intense gaze and back to the normality of homeroom.

Truth be told, Ryoga had almost given up on the search for his hated rival. Genma was an elusive person to find, and he left such little camping footprint that Ryoga had for a long time suspected that he was traveling alone. But it seemed his information was good, because Furinkan High was exactly where it was supposed to be. Sure he took a couple detours, but that was beside the point. He was here, now, and more importantly, so was Ranma. He tightened his grip on his ever-present umbrella, a souvenir from his earliest days in hell, and readied himself for the fight.

It was going to be a mite difficult to find him, though. The front lawn of Furinkan was packed with athletic, hormone-clogged idiots begging to be driven into the dirt. In other words, for someone as inept with directions as Ryoga, the most effective camouflage Ranma could have chosen. He picked his way amongst them, searching for a sign of his hated foe, but they stood in silent ranks and did their best to look identical. Even as Ryoga reached the far edge of their ranks a whisper was passed amongst them, unease passing through them like wildfire, and Ryoga whipped his head around just in time to see two people racing through the gates.

One was a girl with long, dark hair and a fierce scowl on her face, who was pulling along a stubbornly resisting kid, a decade her junior. Even with the distance between them, there was something familiar about the kid to Ryoga, like they'd met before, so long ago that anyone not as obsessive as the junior Hibiki would have dismissed it. But you didn't manage to walk to Quebec from Whales in one night without ignoring nagging feelings.

"Get out of my way!" the girl shouted, and the army of jocks rushed to meet her and her companion. Ryoga retreated to watch from a distance, and found himself mildly impressed as the girl met all of her attackers with ferocious knockout blows, leaving a trail of bodies in her wake that was knee deep for the boy resolutely following her. He said something Ryoga couldn't hear over the sound of facerolling and waved one hand in the air, and that was when it clicked.

It was Ranma. Somehow, Ryoga wasn't sure exactly, but somehow Ranma hadn't aged a day since they had first met in elementary school. Like time had stopped around him, while inexorably trapping those nearby in its inevitable drag towards their end. The dark-haired girl nodded absently at something Ranma had said and dispatched the last of the minions, but Ryoga was already steaming in rage. The sight of the coward who'd stood him up at their duel, no matter how strange the circumstances, filled him with the rage of ten long, lonely years spent roaming the continents in a fruitless quest for vengeance and justice. Ten years of despair and violence, with only the wilderness as his companion, whatever he could scrounge up to sustain his body, and the loop of his memories of Ranma to keep his spirits from plummeting into depression.

There was one final man on the field and still standing, an older student wearing a kendogi and waving about a bokken at one or the other of them, and the girl went from 'calm' to 'DIE!' in less than a second. That was those two out of the way, Ryoga decided, and now all he had to do was jump out and deliver his wrath…

"Ranma Saotome," he said while Ranma's back was turned, "I've seen hell because of you." Ranma was already turning around, his hand straying to his pocket, but Ryoga gathered his strength and attacked with the first warcry that came to mind: "Prepare to die!"

Only, that didn't happen. Ranma's eyes widened in fear, and he pointed whatever he was holding in his hand at Ryoga's approaching form and said "Happogoensatsu!" Ryoga dropped his umbrella in the grass, his energy spent. He desperately tried to hold onto consciousness, but it was a loosing battle. His vision went dark first, his ability to stand second, but the last thing he heard was a deeper baritone than one might expect from a kid saying "Ryoga? Ryoga! Hey man, sorry about that. I didn't…"

XXX

"I dealt with my idiot, you dealt with yours?" Ranma asked cheerfully, Ryoga draped over his shoulder. He was in his teenaged form, which would explain the unconscious schmuck.

"Yep," Akane replied, dusting her hands off. "Kuno's over… somewhere. I wasn't really paying attention. Who's this guy?"

"This is my BFF from elementary school, Ryoga Hibiki," Ranma said proudly. Ryoga moaned. "We did everything together, literally. His sense of direction is so bad, I had to hold his hand on the way to and from school. It got so bad that one day, he disappeared, and he turned up a week later with a bunch of Italian souvenirs."

Akane whistled. "Why'd you drop him?"

"He startled me, is all. I just used the first thing that came to mind." Ranma shifted the guy on his shoulder a bit. "You go to class, and I'll tie him to the bed in the nurse's office. We can walk him home after school, okay?"

She whistled. "No, I'm not coming with you. I've got studying to do, and there's nothing-"

"I'll buy us ice cream."

It was amazing how fast she folded with the promise of sugary confection. According to their father, it came form her mother, because any time one of the Tendo sisters suggested ice cream, he remarked how it used to be Kimiko's favourite. Akane suspected that he might have almost cried, once or twice. "Fine, you win. Be quick, I don't want to be late three days running."

Akane tore off, and Ranma hesitated. Deciding to have mercy and take the burden off of someone else's shoulders, he also grabbed Tatewaki Kuno from his unusual position of upside down, half in and half out of the ground and slung him over his other shoulder. He was going to the infirmary anyways, maybe they could diagnose Kuno with chronic ignorance.

The bell rang while Ranma was halfway there, and he suddenly shrunk to his smaller body just as he was putting the finishing touches on Ryoga's bindings. Ranma looked down at himself in dismay, pulling wistfully at his baggy pants and shirt. If being a girl was like being in a box that was smaller than he was, being six was like being in a universe that was much, much too big. He glanced at the coin in his hand and weighed his options. He could always suck out more energy and go back, but that didn't feel _right_.

His ki returned to functional levels, Ryoga came too with belts strapped around his wrists and ankles, his arms tied to the bedposts of a low-lying cot in a sterile white room. Images from the _last_ time this had happened to him filtered through his mind, and Ryoga struggled against his bindings for all he was worth. Sadly, he was no match for the glazed leather keeping him down.

"Wha-what do you want from me?" he shouted nervously, thinking _'Not again, _please_ not again!'_

"Relax, dude, it's just me," Ranma said, fiddling with the yen. "Sorry about this, but if I didn't, you'd just wander off, and then how would I take you home?"

"Saotome, you cad! Release me so I can take my revenge on you for making my life hell!"

Ranma frowned. "Calm down, Ryoga. It's not _that_ bad. I gotta go to school for second period, but I'll come get you in a couple hours."

Ryoga swore reflexively and thrashed harder. Ranma laughed at his friend's plight and left the clinic before Ryoga's temper got out of hand again. Unfortunately, he had forgotten that he'd put Tatewaki Kuno down outside the examination room, and was assailed by a bokken strike the second he made it out the door.

"Vile sorcerer, I demand to know by what demonic means you drained the very vitality itself from one enshrined by heaven itself, the Blue Thunder!"

Ranma casually sidestepped the bokken and held up his hands. "Alright, alright, I'll tell you." He took out the yen. "See this? With it, I can drain your ki and absorb it myself. Works wonders on the complexion. Wanna see?"

XXX

"How on earth did you pull that off?" Akane asked Ranma, the latter in her female form and toting two ice cream cones. She smirked and held one out to the flabbergasted Akane, who licked it absently.

"Being cute helps. Being _dangerously_ cute is the trick. You might be able to pull it off, if you practice. A good place to start is with random guys on the street. You have a conversation, start flirting a bit, and try to find that sweet spot where you aren't coming on to him, but his brains is flashfried anyways."

"You sure put a lot of thought into that, and you've been a girl for how long?"

"I have my ways, grasshopper…" Ranma said with a fake aura of mystery.

Akane had been having a stressful week, ever since the introduction of Kuno madness, and she decided that the ice cream was a good way to low down and try to get to know Ranma on a more personal level. She licked the dessert again and swallowed, trying to think of something to ask.

"What do you do outside of the Art, Ranma?"

"Hm? Oh, I spent a lot of time learning Chinese, although that wasn't much of a hobby. Pops couldn't speak a word of the language out there, so I had to pick it up fast. I like manga, I suppose, and I used to like cats."

"Used to? How can anybody not like cute little kitty cats?" Akane wondered. "Everybody likes cats. Just look at Hello Kitty!"

"Ah," Ranma said sagely, "that's related to the Happogoensatsu."

This promised to be an interesting story. "Do tell."

Ranma cracked her knuckles. "So when I was, like, six, my dad decided to teach me an invincible technique, something he found in a box of martial arts manuals. The short version is; I got tossed in a pit of cats wrapped in fish sausage a bunch of times." She shuddered. "Grandpa pulled me out a while later, fixed me up and whatever. I asked him if he could teach me how to beat pops, and I got this." She flipped the yen.

"Cool," Akane mused, "so Happosai isn't the lecherous pervert our parents think he is, eh?"

"Nah, he's dirtier than a mud pit all right," confirmed Ranma, "he just has a soft spot for kids. According to pops, he did this to someone else before me, only she was dying of cancer or something."

Akane nodded. Ranma wasn't all that bad, especially when she was a girl. It was like having that little sister she always wanted. It was spoiled by the whole fiancé thing, but only a bit. Akane had guessed by now that even though Ranma was technically sixteen, s/he was perpetually trapped in the 'girl's are _icky_' stage of life. Now with 200% more ass-kicking. In short, everything she wanted in a potential idolizer-slash-younger sister.

The far wall of the café buckled suddenly, spraying drywall dust and glass chips from the window everywhere. The dust kicked up settled immediately, revealing to the two stunned girls that the hole had been made by a Chinese girl with long black hair and chainmail armor. She was currently holding a 9mm pistol in one hand and a shiv in the other, and even as she sat up, she was already clicking a new clip into the empty firearm.

Ranma stared, perhaps a bit impolitely. **"Lord Herb?"** she asked in Chinese, and the girl whipped her head around at the speaker. Herb's face split into a wide grin. **"Saotome! It's good to see you again, squirt. Who's your friend here?"**

Before Ranma could answer, a second Chinese girl, this one with long purple hair and toting a old-fashioned twelve-gauge shotgun, jumped through the wall after her prey and clicked a new shell into the chamber. **"You're days are numbered!"** she shouted, pulling the trigger on the scatter-shot weapon at the prone Chinese warrior. Herb flung one arm out, and a barrier of sparkling pink ki created a shield across the half of the restaurant. Dozens of rifle shells slammed into the hastily-erected shield, cracking it like a windshield in a hurricane, but stopping the lethal projectiles short. Herb waved her hand again, and the wall dissolved, dropping the shells to the floor.

Shampoo thumbed the bolt again, but Herb gathered herself into a crouch and launched herself into a low-flying blur across the tiled floor. She slammed into Shampoo's legs, and the Amazon warrior swung her rifle down in a block that was just seconds short of connecting. The two fell on the ground and began a desperate, rolling struggle for vertical supremacy. The ball of raging female fury hit a wall and rebounded, spinning across the floor. Herb fired two shots, both missed, and Shampoo dropped her shotgun in favour of a chúi to the face. It cracked against the blur of Herb's flying hands, but nonetheless sent the Musk prince(ss) hurtling off of Shampoo's chest.

Panting, Shampoo drew another battlehammer, and Herb stowed her pistol in her sash. **"This is needless, we are endangering foreign noncombatants,"** Herb argued, **"put your weapons down and go home, Xian Pu."**

Shampoo spat at her in response. **"Never, Haabu! You have shamed me in the eyes of my tribe, and I can never return until I have mounted your head on a pike! You I kill!"**

She raised one chúi and steadied her aim. Herb raised her hands again in a warding gesture, preparing to knock the weapon out of the air and quick-draw in case Shampoo decided that collateral damage was suddenly acceptable. Ranma, who had been sneaking away (or pretending to sneak away) turned around while Shampoo's attention was away from her, pulled out her yen, and shouted "Happogoensatsu!"

Shampoo fell face first, her bonbori hammers slipping from her grip, and she was unconscious before she hit the ground. Ranma shot up, not as far as in her male form, her shirt _barely_ covering her assets. Herb smiled sardonically. "That's a new trick," she said sarcastically, in slightly accented Japanese.

Akane come out from behind the counter. "You know this person?" she asked, edging her way towards the prone Shampoo. Ranma and Herb both nodded. "Indeed," the latter said, "she seeks my death for the slight of defeating her in unarmed combat. I drew the conflict away from Bayankala, but she is proving rather difficult to put down. You have my thanks again, squirt."

"Akane, meet Herb, prince of the Musk Dynasty. Herb, this is Akane. She's my dad's friend's daughter, and we might marry each other some day." Akane sweatdropped, and Herb laughed. "Interesting. Perhaps we ought to bind our homicidal friend here and we can exchange stories?"

XXX

Several months ago, Lord Herb and two of his bodyguards, Lime and Mint, had been patrolling the borders of the Musk empire, and one such place was the eastern edge of Jusenkyo valley. As they surveyed the cursed pools, Mint's sharp eyes had picked out a bald old man in a dirty white gi accompanied by a midget obscured by thick clothing. Herb, perhaps forgivably, came to the conclusion that it was none other than Happosai and his corrupt apprentice, Genma Saotome.

He drew up a quick plan of attack. Lime and Mint were to flank Genma, while Herb used the resulting confusion to surprise and hopefully defeat the Grandmaster of Anything Goes. The trio of men crept quietly into the valley while their quarry bickered incessantly over something. The Jusenkyo Guide had wisely decided to remain indoors until such time as his services were required. Nobody ever listened to him, anyways.

Lime and Mint got into a pointless dispute over which side of the infamous Genma Saotome they would be on, and Lime flicked Mint's nose. Mint, enraged, pushed the flailing Lime into a nearby Jusenkyo spring. The splash alerted the two men ahead of them, and Herb sacrificed his advantage for an all-out assault on the ancient pervert. He jumped, putting as much force into the throw as he could, and impacted with Ranma's back at bone-shattering speeds. Ranma had the presence of mind to absorb the blow, taking away much of the destructive power, and in the process Herb was horrified to learn that he had assaulted a kid.

Mint, taking the initiative for once in his life, attacked Genma as fast as he could. While the Saotome patriarch was nobody to sneeze at, Mint's overwhelming speed and blindingly fast fists got in an opportunistic blow, and his second victim to Jusenkyo springs fell into the Spring of Drowned Panda. Mint was mildly surprised to find a berserker panda leap out from the spring and try to maul him, and the two disappeared over the horizon locked in fierce combat.

Meanwhile, Herb and Ranma had both fallen into the Spring of Drowned Woman. Herb, horrified, got over her own curse rather quickly to apologize profusely. Ranma was a little less bothered by the anatomical changes, and spent the first couple minutes in Herb's company waving off apologies and –exploring- her new anatomy. It was a strange sight that greeted the Jusenykyo guide when, a few minutes later, he came out to find a woman nearly in tears and shouting apologies at a younger girl with her hand in her pants, oblivious to former.

To soothe her guilt, Herb offered to escort Ranma to her original destination, the Joketsuzoku village. Ranma agreed cheerfully, but both were miserable in less than a day as a lack of warm water acquainted the two of them with the basics of female hygiene. Herb, due to her unusual upbringing, was inordinately put off by her newfound breasts, especially because Ranma didn't seem to be inflicted with them. They suffered in silence a week of hiking and camping in unseasonably rainy weather on an uphill trek to the Amazon village, and by the time they got there Ranma's normally chipper mood had darkened considerably, and Herb was learning what a period was the hard way.

So when Genma, cowering in terror on a bed of half-eaten fruits from the advances of an angry Amazon warrior, Herb snapped like a stressed length of twine. She watched with a sort of detachment as she brutally beat Shampoo into a bloody pulp with her bare hands, the warrior princess not offering any resistance. It was only when an elder Joketsuzoku said **"Well done, Xian Pu,"** that Herb started to wonder if she had maybe done something wrong.

When Shampoo drew a shotgun and snapped ammunition into the chamber, Genma suddenly found a backbone in time to distract the murderous girl by waving something in her face, but Herb had already hoisted Ranma unceremoniously over one shoulder and ran as fast as she could, Shampoo hot on their heels. They-

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Akane waved her hands wildly, "_what_? You beat her, and then she just whips out a gun and tries to kill you? I don't believe you're telling the truth here."

"You can ask her, if you like," Herb waved at the gagged Shampoo, who was giving a smoldering glare of rage to the assembled martial artists. "I suspect she merely wished for the opportunity to dispatch one of her chief rivals with the aid of firearms, given that the laws of honourable combat bar their use. It took me another week to get back to my own arsenal, but I grabbed this-" she held up her gun "-and gave Ranma back to her father. Then, Shampoo and I learned that you don't become the best warrior in your tribe by being easy to kill."

Ranma snickered. "This is priceless. Why didn't you just change back into a boy?" Shampoo looked startled. "Being married ain't much better than being dead, but it's a start."

Herb shrugged. "I tried, but it was like cold water sought me out at the worst of times. The dark force of Jusenkyo springs, it is called."

"You too?"

Akane butted in, "Since when do martial artists pack guns? No offence, but you don't seem exactly…"

"Civilized?" Herb motioned to the only waitress who hadn't already fled the café. "Normally the Musk and the Joketsuzoku eschew guns as dishonourable, but the elders decided that our generation was an exception. You see, Happosai is greater than the best of us, so Mint, Lime and myself all received modern combat training. It seems Shampoo and her peers did as well. I'd like a kettle of hot water, please," she said to the waitress.

"What now?" Akane asked. Herb sighed. "I hate to impose, but could you possibly take in myself and my prisoner here, at least until we can purchase tickets home? I don't want to swim back again, these are just too annoying," she patted her breasts.

_'Figures, she swims across the sea of Japan, and complains about being a girl,'_ Akane thought bitterly. _'Hell, I bet Ranma's better stacked than me too.'_

As the visibly nervous waitress handed Herb a kettle, Akane leaned over to Ranma and whispered, "Could you suck his ki out? Our house can't handle more boarders, we're stretched too thin as it is."_ 'Kasumi wouldn't say no, that's for sure,'_ she added to herself. Ranma gave her a strange look, but took aim nonetheless and said, as quietly as she could, "Happogoensatsu."

Her grown female form was a bit shorter than both Akane and Herb, but her breasts were definitely better developed than Akane's. _'Goddamnit,'_ she swore to herself. Herb swayed on her feet as she tipped the kettle over her head, and his body shot up six inches. His regalia now fit perfectly, awkward bulges gone, but he remained conspicuously conscious. Herb twisted to look at the now-grown Ranma and cracked a smile.

"I was wondering if you could do that. Nice form of immortality you've got there, squirt. Like a vampire, but with less blood."

"You got a lotta ki," Ranma commented, and Akane's teeth ground in her head. Herb nodded and picked Shampoo up. "Can we go back to your place now?"

XXX

Ryoga escaped from Furinkan at lunch time, after a confusing encounter with the school nurse, and promptly got lost. In his doomed search for Ranma's classroom, he somehow smashed his way out through the back doors of the school and onto a neighboring baseball diamond. With a cry of "Where on earth am I now?" he unclipped his umbrella and charged off.

Hours passed as he sprinted full tilt up and down the winding and close-knit streets of Nerima, and still Ranma refused to show his face. He would never admit it, least of all to himself, but Ryoga was tired of Ranma, tired of martial arts, tired of chasing, but most of all, tired of being lost. He recalled his father's advice about psychiatric help, just before his 'three month business trip' that had somehow taken almost a decade. He resolved to get help, just as soon as he dealt with his problem.

The final bell at Furinkan buzzed off, somewhere he couldn't see, and Ryoga screamed. He fell down in the middle of the street and rested against a chain-link fence in the crash position, letting his all-consuming misery devour his soul. For a few minutes, he was paralyzed by combating fear and helplessness, and just when he felt like he could safely move without vomiting all over himself, a little old lady splashed the sidewalk with cold water form a ladle.

"Bwee!" Ryoga cried. Something inside him died, and as he marched out of his too-big clothes, lying in a heap on the ground, he amended his earlier resolve of seeking professional help to… something a little more drastic. Then…

"Hello there," a girl said, "who're you?" She had a short brown hair and flinty brown eyes, and she wore a Furinkan girl's uniform. She bent down and, before Ryoga could react, snatched up her prize. "Aren't you just the cutest?" she cooed, nuzzling her cheek against Ryoga's snout, and the pig felt his blood warm. "You don't have a collar," she observed, "so you don't have an owner?" Ryoga nodded fervently, wishing he knew why.

"That's great! I'm going to take you home." Without warning, she stuffed Ryoga into her book bag and took off running again. "Bwee," Ryoga cursed, and if you were _also_ an anthropomorphic piglet, you would have heard his trademark curse.

"Ranma Saotome, this is all your fault!"

**Cancer, but Leukaemia specifically. I'm not sure if Ninomiya's diagnosis is important, but it pays to be sure.**


	5. The Crushing Power of Irony

**To answer your question, 'guest,' I suppose it could have been magic, given that it's an amazon weapon. Since when are any of their things -not- magic? Or Shampoo has Amagikuren punches, repurposed for modern warfare. If it helps, I was imagining a Lee Enfield rifle. It's not important. In case you haven't guessed by now, Ranma isn't the buttmonkey in this story. **_**That**_** role gets passed around like a cheap bottle of wine.**

_The Diary of Ranma Saotome: Year 10, Day 264_

_So I just found out that if I use the five-yen shot, I get older. It's cool, I guess. Pops and I stopped at his friend's house, and I'm supposed to marry the guy's kid. She's alright, but I'd rather have an older sister. Then I'll have two (sorta)! Herb's stayin' at our house for a bit. Oh yeah, and Akane did somethin' stupid._

XXX

Lime emerged from the Jusenkyo spring gasping for air. He hauled himself onto shore and lay on the ground, chest heaving, and stayed there for some time. Mint and Herb had gone long ago, he assumed, but there was the Jusenkyo guide as a perpetual helper to the newly cursed. It had been drilled into his class during their studies on the arcane, and so Lime, who felt perfectly himself, got up and jogged carefully past the other springs and into the man's hut.

The guide was waiting for him at his desk, staring intently at the map of the cursed springs. **"Hello, honoured guest,"** he said distractedly, **"I have hot water boiling on the stove. Help yourself, if you can reach."**

Lime looked down at his perfectly normal hands. Normal in one sense, freakish in that they could crush boulders with ease and looked suspiciously like claws. **"But I'm fine, sir,"** he said, confused. The guide whipped around, astonished, and his expression changed from one of joy to horror. **"Oh no,"** he gasped, **"this isn't good. Which spring did you fall into, honoured guest?"**

Lime waved vaguely out the window at the watering hole that had failed to claim his soul. **"Hmm,"** the guide mused, **"I forget exactly which spring that is. Ah well, just try to avoid cold water, and if you happen to find any changes to your personality, come back right away."**

XXX

**"Curse you, foreign devils,"** Shampoo screamed, **"I shall slough the meat from your bones and drown you in your own blood! Roast in the fires of Nifelheim, and may Ratatosk devour your souls!"**

**"Shut up, I'm trying to eat,"** Ranma countered, and Shampoo launched into another tirade against her incarcerons. "Language, Shampoo," Kasumi admonished, having caught the Chinese word for 'Whore' more than once. Herb nodded in agreement and sipped his coffee. "You talk big, for a disarmed prisoner."

Nabiki came downstairs, already dressed and carrying in her arms a little black piglet. "Hey everyone, I have a new pet," she called out, met by a chorus of cutesy sentiments. The pig blushed and wriggled feebly in her arms. "I haven't named him yet," said Nabiki, "and I was wondering if you guys might help me."

Ranma considered. "What about Zhu?" he asked hopefully. Shampoo stopped screaming hatefully to add a baleful **"Bèn!"** Herb snickered. "He reminds me of my bodyguard. What about Mint?"

"Nah, doesn't make any sense," Akane said. "I think P-chan is a good name for him. The 'P' is for pig, and the 'chan' is for cute. Cute pig, fits perfectly."

Nabiki flipped one of the piglet's ears back, earning her a vicious snort. "I like that. It'll be funny when he gets older. 'Oh, what's that big ol' hog's name? P-chan!'"

XXX

She sat in a tree, the leaves turning her into a wrathful shadow high above her targets. There were three of them, milling around the base of the trunk like restless ants, constantly checking every direction, covering each other's backs. They were prepared for confrontation, that much was obvious, and their vigilance did her proud, but they had no choice but to fall. She had a reputation to preserve, after all.

Their flaw: spiral defense failed to accommodate an aerial attack.

Cackling like a mad hag, she found the perfect hole in their trio and dropped between, right when their backs were turned to the empty spot between them. With a flick of her wrist she held a wooden hammer bound in brass in her right hand, and she brought it down with all her might on the back of the first girl's shin. Bone cracked with a pleasing crunch, and the girl screamed in pain before shock brought her to her knees.

The other two were faster off the mark. One of the girls, panic evident in her face, withdrew a rubber ball filled with unset concrete and threw it to her, but she merely swung her mallet about and the two collided in midair. The heavy weapon flew from her grasp, but she was faster than her opponent and was already holding her next weapon. A ribbon, completely ordinary save for its wielder. She twirled it once, twice, and with a sharp snap the strong fabric encircled the other girl's wrist tighter than handcuffs and _infinitely_ more offensive.

The third, the captain of the Furinkan High Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics Team, was unflappable in the face of her defeat. Once again, she had earned some modicum of respect from her adversary, but not nearly enough to avoid what was inevitably coming. The captain had not gained her position by screwing around when time was against her, for she was already on the offensive with a hoop. Unlike the conventional model, this weapon was tailored with a razor edge on the _inside_, rather than the far edge, and it was with this blade that Kodachi Kuno was nearly decapitated.

It sailed towards her head in a perfect descent, and the internal martial arts calculator within the scion of Kuno realized immediately that if it landed, it would spin around her neck until she bled. Even with her desperate dodge, the leaden hoop still gave her a hard knock to the side of the head. She shrugged it off easily. Her maxim returned to her: _'There are no rules,'_ and she smiled.

"Impressive," Kodachi said silkily, "I admire your nerve and killing intent, but the time for games is over. Surrender and I will show mercy, as much as I can."

Sayuri, longtime friend of Akane Tendo and legendary gymnast fighter of Furinkan High, spat at Kodachi's feet. "You bitch," she seethed, "you can't even face us in a fair fight! We'll never surrender!"

Kodachi laughed, a disturbing sound that called to mind a murder of crows devouring a dying animal. "Ho ho ho ho, you really believe that, don't you?" she said with mock incredulity. "Well, must that I am the one to inform you," and she tightened her grip on the ribbon's handle, "but there is _no such thing as a fair fight!_"

She ducked even before she saw Sayuri move, anticipating a strike from the loosing girl, and yanked on the ribbon. The second girl's eyes went wide as the world tilted alarmingly on its axis, and suddenly the vertical horizon blurred as she went into a Kodachi-induced tailspin at the penultimate able-bodied member of her team.

Sayuri dodged, barely. Without the means to ensure her comrade's safety, she simply jumped to the side. The living projectile hurtled into a tree, and all was silent.

"This is the end for you and yours," Kodachi said simply, and she whipped her ribbon forward.

"Hold it!"

Kodachi looked down the ribbon's length to see who had dared to interfere with her imperial will, and was shocked to see a young girl casually holding the tip of her weapon at arm's length.

It would here be assumed that the ribbon had been blocked by a martial artist of greater caliber than Kodachi, but regardless of age that simply did not fly in Kodachi's private universe. Her mental engines therefore rewrote the action of stopping the ribbon as her own, _heroically_ slowing down to protect the innocent child. In the blink of an eye, Kodachi went from 'rage' to 'awwwww!'

"Awwwww!" she exclaimed, reaching out to the petite figure of the redheaded child. Ranma's preservation instinct recalibrated to include affection from strangers too late, and she was still pondering the strange turn of events when Kodachi had hoisted her up by her armpits. She dangled like a ragdoll from Kodachi's arms, undecided on whether or not to suck her captor's life force out.

"You are just the cutest little girl I've ever seen!" Kodachi crooned. "Look at you, you're so adorable. You look like me when I was your age. Ooooooh, I still have some dresses that might fit you in my closet." She pinched Ranma's cheeks fondly.

"Hey, what'd you do to our gymnastics team?" Akane asked loudly. Kodachi dropped Ranma immediately and straightened her black leotard self-consciously. "What have I done? I merely begin our contest of martial mastery before the appointed time. There's nothing suspect in that."

"Bullshit, you ambushed us!" Sayuri shouted. "Without Ryoko and Setsuna, we've got no choice but to forfeit at the match."

"Ambush? Oh, you make it sound as though I have cheated, when we have truly been fighting in all fairness! Before the match, that is"

Akane cracked her knuckles and advanced on the elder Kuno. "Get lost," she said menacingly. Sayuri took up position on Akane's left, and Ranma dusted herself off before adopting a fighting stance that would have looked precocious on any other child. It made her look downright dangerous. Kodachi surveyed the forces against her and made an executive decision.

"Farewell, peasants. I have succeeded in what I have come to accomplish." With a screech of laughter she turned and jumped over a fence, disappearing in an urban jungle. Sayuri relaxed visibly, her arms sagging, and she let out a sob.

"What's wrong?" Akane asked her friend, lowering her arms. Sayuri indicated the fallen gymnasts, Ryoko simply unconscious but Setsuna wrapped around a tree. Her normally light brown hair was soaked red. "We've lost all our best women, and even if Ryoko can walk straight tomorrow, Setsuna has a concussion. Furinkan is two short."

"How many matches are there?" Akane asked conversationally, wrapping one arm consolingly around Sayuri's shoulders. The gymnast captain counted on her fingers. "Let's see, there are three matches, best two of three. It was pretty much just us three, and Kodachi is gonna cream whoever she fights, and now I'm the only one on our team. We did have an advantage; the St. Hebereke team doesn't practice much because they have Kodachi, but that doesn't do much if they win two matches by default."

"We'll help," Ranma volunteered. "You can teach Akane how to use those weird weapons you guys have, and I can just, uh…" she floundered.

"Use the coin?" Akane supplied. "Yeah, we can help."

Sayuri smiled hopefully. "You'd do that? The match is in a week, you don't have much time…"

"What are friends for?"

XXX

"Hey, Herb?"

The Chinese warlord looked up from his newspaper at the speaker. "What do you need, squirt?"

Ranma put one hand in her pocket. "I noticed that your ki supply is really big. How much do you have, exactly?"

Herb shrugged. "I'm not sure. Probably four or five times as much as a regular human, I suppose. I _am_ a dragon. Why do you ask?"

"No reason."

"All right then."

"Happogoensatsu!"

XXX

Nabiki set P-chan down carefully on her bed and walked over to her dresser. "I was worried about you today," she told him, not expecting an answer. "Wandering off like that, you should be ashamed of yourself. How am I supposed to keep track of you if you disappear every time I turn my head?"

She wasn't looking, which meant she didn't see P-chan duck his piggy head in shame.

"Now wait right here P-chan, I'm going to use the furo." She casually pulled her shirt off and tossed it in her laundry hamper. "Then I, uh, jeez, I didn't get you a place to sleep yet. We should buy a one of those pet beds that look like laundry baskets, if that's even what a pig sleeps in. Of course," she added mischievously, "a handsome fellow like yourself can _always_ spend a night or two with me."

It didn't help that Nabiki was now completely naked. Ryoga's mental quandary, whether to get his revenge on Ranma versus continuing the show, was now secondary to staying conscious despite his massive nosebleed. The black piglet's fur was dark red and sticky from the blood, and Nabiki noticed this with some disapproval.

"You! What's have you been doing all day, rolling in mud?" she asked plaintively, misidentifying the liquid that besmirched her pet. "That's it, I'm giving you a bath."

Squealing in fear, 'P-chan' was carted off to the bathroom by the naked Tendo sister. She set the piglet down on the edge of the furo and fiddled with the taps until a hearty stream of hot water burbled out of the faucet. Humming quietly, she grabbed a bucket and began scrubbing herself off with cold water and soap, her back to the door.

It is a well-known fact that skill in martial arts is inversely proportional to avoidance of mundane accidents. One of his paws slipped, and Ryoga fell in the half-filled furo. Immediately, he felt his body expand into its natural form, and for the first time the transformation was accompanied by a feeling of dread.

Hearing the splash, Nabiki hurriedly washed off the rest of the soap and kicked the stool aside to get back to P-chan. The equally disrobed Nabiki and Ryoga (in a position you are probably familiar with) faced each other over the rim of the furo. Ryoga started sweating heavily.

_'Ranma, I don't know how, but I'm certain that this is your fault!'_

XXX

Say what you will about her sanity, but Kodachi Kuno knew Nerima like the back of her hand. It was child's play for her to find the Tendo dojo's address, given that several of her classmates attended there. So it was with a certain dissatisfaction that Kodachi donned her Black Rose leotard, armed herself with her mallet and set out to cripple her opposition.

It wasn't that she found putting people in the hospital to be cathartic, no, it was just that St. Hebereke had an unbroken record in their martial extracurriculars. Wouldn't do to leave that in doubt, no matter how superior she was to the competition.

A few kilometers later Kodachi alighted on the windowsill of a second floor bedroom and slid the window open. It was just after six in the morning, and the sun hadn't yet come up. Saturday, so any sane teenager was still dead to the world. Drowsiness filled the air. Kodachi crossed the floor toward's Akane's futon as quietly as she could, removing the mallet from its sheath and scanning her opponent's sleeping form. She decided to hit her in the hip; once solid strike would shatter her pelvis and put her out of the game for at least a year.

She rose the blunt instrument above her head and smiled grimly…

Akane Tendo awoke knowing that something was very wrong. Her danger sense was screaming shrilly in her ear, and she responded by throwing herself clear of her bed as fast as humanly possible. The mallet destroyed the futon, cracking the floor beneath. Her heart pounding, vision swimming, Akane pulled herself to standing.

"You're quite the martial artist, aren't you?" Kodachi asked rhetorically. "Not many would have heard me coming. Not to worry, you're almost done anyways. Hold still now…"

She brought her mallet across sideways and Akane blocked with her leg, sweeping the weapon past her body and bringing the older girl closer. Off balance, Kodachi couldn't block the two quarter-punches to her floating ribs. Her side splitting, she tried a lame barehanded attack, but Akane swept it aside without thinking about it and headbutted Kodachi in the forehead. Both combatants groaned and stumbled back.

The mallet slipped from her grasp. She could literally feel her concentration slipping. "I… I will have… the match is…" Kodachi ground out, but even as she managed to form a coherent thought Akane had kicked her out the window. She fell both stories to the front lawn, where she might have broken her neck or something just as horrible had Ranma not been practicing Tai Chi directly beneath her.

"Ooof," she grunted, vaguely thankful for having her fall broken by something soft. Kodachi rolled over and got to her knees, allowing Ranma to pop up like a jack-in-the-box behind her, irked by the interruption.

"Excuse me, but what happened-"

And then he couldn't breath. Ranma was suffocating in a unique torture, one constructed of 100% pure irony. Marshmallow hell. "You're so _cute_!" Kodachi shrieked. "Oh my God, what are you, five? Six? Why couldn't you be _my_ age?" she pouted. What little of Ranma's body was visible was flailing like a dying koi in the hands of an inexperienced fisherman. He would have sucked out her ki, or fought back, or begged for mercy, but the crushing irony was just too much.

Akane stuck her head out the window and looked down. _'Do I even want to know?'_ she wondered. She walked back to where the mallet was, threw it out the window, and closed the shutters.


	6. Not Entirely Incompetent

_Ten hours earlier…_

"Ryoga, right?" Nabiki asked icily. "I remember you from school. I have a couple questions for you. Like, why are you in my bathroom? Without clothes on? Go on, I want to hear this one."

Ryoga got out of the bathroom and faced the middle Tendo. "I don't have to explain myself to you," he said fiercely. "I'm here on a mission to destroy Ranma Saotome, and-"

"So what the hell is this, a detour?"

"I don't have to explain myself to you," Ryoga hissed. He tried to go around Nabiki, who pushed him back. "Nu-uh, asshole, not until I get answers. Or recompense, if you're good for it…" she smiled seductively. Ryoga started sweating again.

"M-move it," he threatened. When Nabiki continued to look at him expectantly, he punched. She caught it underneath and twisted his arm around, smacking his head against the wall and spinning him around completely. He shook his head to clear his thoughts and growled, reaching for a bandana. "Is that a challenge?"

"You martial artist types, so formal with everything. What do you think?"

Ryoga shrugged. "Whatever, you asked for it." He threw the bandana, the razorcloth hardening into a solid cutting plane that whizzed at Nabiki's head. She stepped to the side of the shot and deflected the lethal headgear into the wall. Like an errant shurikan the bandana sank into the sheetrock like a hot knife through butter.

"That's five hundred yen for property damage," Nabiki said, "do you want to keep going?"

Another volley of bandanas sliced at her, two missing completely but the third scoring a hit across Nabiki's shoulder. In fairness to Ryoga, his aim was mostly challenged by his target. In particular, his target's…

"Like what you see?" she asked, and kicked him in the jaw. Ryoga's head snapped up, and he slid back a few centimeters. Capitalizing, he pushed off Nabiki's foot and bullrushed her into the hallway. She hit the wall opposite the bathroom lightly enough to bring an elbow down on Ryoga's head. He hit the floor but went for her legs, not daring to look up, and Nabiki went down as well.

Ryoga kneed her expertly in the thigh, and Nabiki choked back pain as her entire leg seized up. She jerked away from her attacker, and Ryoga punched her in chest. Due to certain aspects of female biology, this blow was not only less than effective, it stopped him dead. While the young Hibiki contemplated the trainwreck his life had morphed into, Nabiki kicked him through the door to the kitchen. He slid across the kitchen on his back, coming to rest at Kasumi's heels. The eldest sister turned around from washing the dishes and took one look at what was going on.

"Nabiki? Are you doing what I think you're doing…?"

Ryoga turned beet-red and protested, "We weren't, I swear! I was just here looking for Ranma, but then I was in the bathroom, and she was-"

"Depends," Nabiki said coolly, "what do you think I'm doing?"

"Well," Kasumi said thoughtfully, "I would guess from your states of undress and this young man's flustered appearance, coupled with your rather calm demeanor, that you were in the bathroom before Ryoga came in- and you attacked him for being a pervert. Am I right?"

Ryoga facefaulted. It was hard to do, considering that he was already on the floor. Then Kasumi dropped a soaping wet frying pan on his head. Nabiki inclined her head. "Thanks, sis. That was a close one. It's weird, he was bothered by us being naked, but not really. Is every martial artist in Nerima but me asexual?"

"Nabiki, repressing your feelings isn't healthy. I'm sure you're just projecting your frustration onto Ryoga. You _know_ he was peeping on you in the bath. Doesn't that mean he has a healthy libido?"

It was the worst thing Kasumi could have said.

XXX

Akane would have liked to practice for the gymnastics tournament more that night, but it was her turn to teach the intermediate classes in the dojo. She looked up from her homework at the clock, groaned, and threw on her gi before racing out to old oak building in her family' backyard. Already, some of the younger green belts and blue belts were milling around in the practice hall, idly practicing their kata and chatting with friends. There were fourteen due for practice that night, and when the last one dashed through the door just seconds before starting, Akane stood up from her kneeling position. Instantly, all of them stopped talking and jumped to attention.

"Welcome back everyone," Akane said. "We worked on some exercises for balance last time, so today we'll have another shot at using tonfa. If everyone is at least familiar with the basics, we can spar later on. Grab your weapons."

Akane was universally acknowledged as the most approachable master of the Art. Maybe not the best fighter, as nearly every student at the dojo had seen her trounced by her father at least once or twice. But she was a patient teacher who made time for her students, which lead to her taking the lion's share of the work there. It was fine with her, because it gave martial arts a meaningful purpose for her. Beating the tar out of every warm-blooded male at Furinkan every morning didn't count.

They were just pairing off for the promised sparring when Ranma, shirtless and eating a bar of chocolate, waltzed into the dojo. "Akane," he said, waving the chocolate, "you need to practice with your gymnastics weapons if you're ever gonna' win on the weekend."

Akane sighed heavily. "Why," she said with exaggerated condescension, "are you interrupting my class? I still have to oversee another half hour before dad takes over."

"You're sparring already," Ranma suggested, "so fight me. Come _on_, did you have anything better to do?"

Akane contemplated waving mutely at the class full of students around them, or asking why he was shirtless, or eating chocolate, but settled on acceptance. "Class, go against the wall. This is Ranma Saotome, and he's going to instruct me in fighting using Rhythmic Gymnastics."

The students obediently knelt against the wall, albeit with some snickering. Ranma devoured the rest of the chocolate and tossed the wrapper aside. "Right, you take the ribbon and I'll go with a hoop."

They squared off to the mixed curiosity and amusement of the Tendo-Ryu students. Akane twirled the ribbon experimentally in her hand, and the length of pink cloth whipped into pleasing geometric spirals, a cone extending out from her arm. Ranma took a hoop that was nearly as large as he was, which he grabbed around the edges with both hands. It looked like he was trying to hug it.

Akane flicked the ribbon towards Ranma, trying to twist it around his wrists, ankles, or anything unfortunate enough to cross its path. Something did… but it was Akane herself. The ribbon cinched tightly around her waist and swung downwards, the momentum ripping the plastic handle out of her hands and allowing the ribbon to complete its spin. She took an experimental step and fell flat on her face. Ranma laughed uproariously, letting go of the hoop with one hand.

"Real graceful, Tendo," he noted, approaching the fallen martial artist. "Were you hoping she was going to laugh herself to death?"

Akane growled and swiped at Ranma's legs, which the younger kid artfully deflected with the hoop. "Rule number one," he stated in a monotone, "no hand-to-hand contact allowed. All attacks must use a medium of some kind." So saying, Ranma bopped her on the nose with the hula hoop.

"Laugh it up," Akane hissed, working her hands under the ribbon wrapped around her legs. "As soon as I get out of this ribbon I'm going to force-feed you that hoop!"

"Bravo," Ranma applauded, returning to smacking his opponent in the face with the hoop. "You've found rule number two: there are no other rules. As long as you don't directly hit your opponent, anything goes."

"Sounds familiar," one of the students quipped, and the girls on either side of him slapped their hands over his mouth and nodded politely, like it had never happened.

"_Really_? Huh," Akane grunted, loosening the ribbon enough to wriggle out. Ranma quickly skipped out of range, a smug grin plastered on his face, and Akane felt a surge of rage at being beaten by a little boy. Then it was replaced by a flash of deviousness.

"The definition of insanity is repeating an action and expecting a different result, so what on earth are you doing _this_ time?" Ranma asked as Akane spiraled the ribbon around her arm again.

"Oh, just the same thing," she said nonchalantly, before hurtling herself across the distance between them and launching the attack. As expected, it completed a full turn and returned to the attacker, but not before Akane had interposed the hapless Ranma between herself and the ribbon. This time, the ribbon's momentum carried it to Akane's torso, and the spiral yanked Ranma halfway around before he realized what was happening.

When the dust settled, Akane's arms were pinned to her sides, but Ranma Saotome was completely immobilized against her back, the hoop lying forgotten on the floor.

"I win," Akane said snidely, shaking her body for emphasis. Ranma roared, sounding remarkably like an amplified mouse, and began trying to bite the back of Akane's shoulder. She responded by running backwards into the wall of the dojo, impacting with a sickening _thud_.

"I will never surrender!" Ranma screamed, his face squashed between Akane's back and the wall, and returned to biting. Akane giggled and started rubbing up against the wall, dragging Ranma's face back and forth. Two dozen teenagers sweatdropped when Ranma bucked hard enough against the wall to knock their sensei flat on her face, the kid strapped to her back snarling and spitting as he tried to free himself. Akane, now laughing too hard to be coherent, log rolled out of the dojo, Ranma's face making a pleasing squeak every time it mashed against the floor.

"Oh, look at the time!"

"Yeah, Soun should be here by now."

"I've got a meatloaf in the oven, I should really get going…"

"You can't cook, Inari…"

There was a splash as the most ridiculous fight ever toppled into the koi pond, followed by a series of bubbling noises. Most of the students had left by then, but nobody stayed long enough for Ranma to bite through the ribbon and latch onto Akane's back of her own volition…

XXX

He was turned away at the gate. Lime, the best and brightest (well, maybe not brightest) Musk warrior was repelled from his own village by his fellow Musk! The guards, almost gibbering with fear, had stammered something about there being 'far too many,' which made absolutely no sense to the warrior. Nevertheless, the will of Herb's father was law, so Lime sadly turned away from the village without a destination in mind.

A thought struck him; the Jusenkyo Guide had mentioned that Herb had left for the Joketsuzoku village! Triumph breaking through the despair, Lime set out to cross the Bayankala mountain range again, this time with purpose. As he neared the gates of Nyucheizu, however, they repelled him as well! A small army of women armed with scimitars and their bare fists leapt over the village fortifications and threatened to kill him if Lime did not retreat. The extremely confused tiger-man asked pleadingly where Herb had gone, and he was happily met with hysterical screams of **"JAPAN! HE'S IN JAPAN!"**

So, to Japan it was. Lime had never gone before, but wherever his Prince went, he went also. He was less than enthusiastic about having to cross the ocean, but that was a small price to pay for enlightenment. Scavenging a few changes of clothes and a week's worth of rations, Lime struck out for the east.

XXX

Ryoga opened his eyes blearily. The last thing he remembered, he had been hit in the head with a frying pan over and over until he was unconscious, and judging from the size of the bruise on his forehead, probably a few minutes afterwards too. He sat up, or rather tried to, as his hands had been plasticuffed behind his back. Now _very_ awake, Ryoga's eyes snapped open and surveyed where he was.

Naked, on a bed, tied to the headboard with belts. The bedsheets were a muted shade of pink with purple highlights and Hello Kitty motifs at even intervals, which set alarm bells off in his head. The _last_ time this had happened, Haruna had… best not to think about that. It seemed, to Ryoga, that there were very few positives to this new hell Ranma had subjected him to. He couldn't really get lost, but that was outweighed in less than ten minutes by the desperate need to go to the bathroom. He considered calling out, but his experience with Haruna convinced him that it would probably make it all worse.

Half an hour after awakening, the girl he'd walked in on in the bathroom walked in, wearing a Furinkan High uniform. "Hello," she said casually, dumping her bookbag on a chair and plopping down on the bed.

"That's _it_?" Ryoga asked. "Just _hello_? Not, '_hi, I'm Nabiki Tendo, here's why I've tied you to my bed.' _?"

Nabiki rolled her eyes, seemingly unperturbed by Ryoga's state of undress. He supposed it was because all of the clothing in the house was either sized for girls or Ranma, who was a good deal out of his size range. "I really have to go," Ryoga insisted, hoping that the double meaning would get through to his captor. "Can I have my clothes back?"

"So you have to piss. Big deal, you can hold it. You'd better not have an accident on my bed," the middle Tendo threatened. "Although…" she added, trailing off.

"Where the hell did you get these?" Ryoga demanded, sweat beading up on his brows as he snapped his wrists together.

"The cuffs? Oh, Shampoo gave them to me. She was more than happy when I told her what I wanted them for. Get this, she actually offered to help! I said no, of course; I can handle you on my own."

Ryoga got a sinking feeling in his stomach. He suspected that this was going to go _exactly_ like the incident with Haruna.

"Can I go to the washroom first?" he asked meekly, and Nabiki shook her head. "Nah. I take it you know how this ends, right?"

Ryoga wimpered.

"Excellent! I've always wanted a pet, and now he's already trained himself!"

**The ending of this chapter did not come easily for me, but it was something that had to be said. For the sake of plot progression, however painful that is to me.**


	7. Cut Loose

The Tendo house was quiet. It was a lazy Saturday afternoon, and Akane had left with Ranma and Sayuri for the Rhythmic Gymnastics match against St. Hebereke. Kasumi was shopping for dinner, Soun and Genma had gone to watch the match, and Nabiki was off walking P-chan. Shampoo, hogtied and gagged with an old dishrag, was napping peacefully on rug. That left Prince Herb, who was sitting before the coffee table, pouring over the newspaper.

He was looking for an apartment in Nerima. Shampoo was proving to be a greater moral quandary than he was up to solving. On the one hand, he could do what was expected of him and kill her. It was permissible, and even expected that between the four tribes of the Bayankala Mountains, there was no mercy. Shampoo had slipped between the lines of the rules and lost, consigned to death rather than marriage, but Herb wasn't sure he was ready to take the first step to becoming a blooded warrior. The thought of slitting her throat made him want to vomit, so the uneasy dragon pushed it from his mind.

The second matter was the curse. Herb had somehow managed to land himself in the one spring that effectively exiled him from his homeland. Much as women lead the Joketsuzoku, the Musk were highly patriarchal. It would be less of a problem if his father wasn't the High Arbiter, but none of his fellow warriors would ever bow to him, even if he was a man most of the time. Most sages agreed that Jusenkyo was the most permanent of fates, which was why the highest order of punishment for the Musk was to be immersed in the Spring of Drowned Insect, or something equally horrible, and locked that way.

In short, Prince Herb could probably expect to last less than a week before an especially lucky assassin came along.

He was being a coward by running away, but the best possible solution involved a casket of Spring of Drowned Man and a well-timed heart attack. Instead, Herb decided to buy time. He was already imposing on the goodwill of Soun Tendo, and Shampoo was entirely too volatile to be left near damn well anybody. The tall teenager traced one finger down a handwritten list of locations within his price range, which was fairly short. Heir to an empire he may well have been, but Herb only had a few RMB on him during his routine patrol. Combined with Shampoo's money, admittedly more than his own, and Nabiki Tendo's absurdly generous (for her) 'incentive' to get the hell out of her house was just enough for a third-rate two-room apartment for three months.

**"This bites,"** the emperor cursed, resigning himself to living in squalor overseas with a homicidal maniac ready to slit his throat at the first lapse in his vigilance.

XXX

"No, don't!" Akane screamed, but it was too late. Ranma had sniffed the bouquet of black roses on the table. She swayed on her feet, and the eminent martial artist bit the dirt. Sayui's eyes went wide, and the gymnast rushed over to catch her ersatz teammate before she hit the ground.

"What do we do now?" she bemoaned, shaking Ranma's head despondently.

"We forfeit one match," Akane said decisively. "As long as we both win our matches, we'll still have pulled off a win. It's going to be close, though…"

"Can we do it?" Sayuri asked. "I'm pretty good, and so are you, but Kodachi is way better than me and, no offence, you still suck with the tools."

"We'd better," Akane said grimly. "Go tell the referees."

XXX

The door opened and shut, causing Herb to look up from his list. Nabiki spent a moment shucking her shoes and windbreaker by the door, then walked into the hosue proper. She was accompanied by P-chan, the black piglet's leash dangling from her grip. He wore a pink collar studded with rhinestones, which the pig was engaged in trying to remove. The Ice Queen sat down next to Herb and peered over his shoulder. "Moving out I see," she commented. "Have somewhere in mind?"

"Yes," Herb said. "This one." He indicated an option on his list, circled in pen. "Cheap and close by."

"Planning on staying?" Nabiki asked.

"I can't very well go home. My citizens would flay me alive."

"Damn. Sucks," Nabiki said flatly.

"Why is his collar pink?" Herb asked, mildly curious. The colour pink's association with the female persuasion crossed all boundaries, including those that divided a misogynistic tribe of savage warriors from the rest of China.

"I picked it for _me_, not him," Nabiki emphasized carefully. "Besides, it stretches nicely." He wasn't entirely sure what to make of that, so Herb remained silent.

"Anybody hiring in Nerima?" he asked.

XXX

"She was weak," Sayuri decided. Hardly even sweating, the young fighter clambered out of the ring to a mix of cheers and boos from the bleachers. Akane patted her on the shoulder and offered her a water bottle, which Sayuri accepted gratefully.

"Seriously, what was that?" she asked, confused. The petite St. Hebereke gymnast had hardly even put up a fight before Sayuri had thrown her out of the ring, and even then it had felt like a mercy killing rather than a victory. Akane shrugged, equally bewildered. "I suppose that Kodachi's team doesn't get in a lot of real matches," she suggested. "Their captain likes putting the opposition in traction, so this arena doesn't get a lot of matches."

"I am _so_ glad you get Kodachi," Sayuri said.

"Yeah. Me too," Akane deadpanned. Ranma snored on.

XXX

"… and Dr. Tofu is looking for an assistant," Nabiki finished. "Aren't you royalty? Why are you looking for work instead of calling your family for money?"

Herb sighed and shoved the assorted papers on the coffee table into a corner of the table. "Long story," he abbreviated.

"Whatever. I'm going to go give P-chan a bath. He's gotten all dirty on our walk. _Haven't you_, widdle P-chan?" The pig shivered violently, and Nabiki scooped him up before he could run away. Herb watched them go down the hallway, and it was a few minutes before he worked up the nerve to call the landlord he wanted to rent from. Just as he was reaching for the phone, the doorbell rang.

"Can you get that?" Nabiki hollered down. Herb contemplated calling her a lazy bitch, but antagonizing her would probably leave him homeless. He instead answered the door, and was surprised to find…

**"Rimu!"** Herb exclaimed. His bodyguard, Lime, was standing in the doorway. The tiger warrior was bleeding everywhere, one ear torn and bloody scratches covering his body. He raised one hand shakily. **"Lo-lord Haabu!"** he saluted, blood spurting out of his arm. Herb winced. **"I've found you at last!"**

Lime swayed on his feet… and died. As he fell to the ground, face frozen in an expression of adoration for the dragon before him, the shocked and somewhat numb Herb saw a kunai sticking out of the back of Lime's head. **"Wh-wha…?"** he mumbled weakly, before regaining his footing. **"WHO DID THIS!"** he roared in Chinese.

**"Lord Haabu! I've found you at last!"** The speaker was… Lime? The _second_ tiger man was in much better condition than the first, only sporting one or two bleeding gashes on his torso. **"They're everywhere! I-"** The warrior was tackled from the side, a red blur smashing him into the ground. The melee went on for a minute, Herb still staring with his mouth wide open, when it slowed enough for him to recognize a _third Lime_ viciously attempting to gouge out the eyes of the Lime who had killed the first Lime.

**"What's going on?"** Herb asked, but neither Lime slowed enough to answer him.

**"It's a long story,"** said Lime #4, who materialized out from behind a tree on the front lawn. **"Basically, I-"** Herb whipped out his gun and shot him. Limes #2 and #3 stopped momentarily to watch their brethren fall, then returned to their own struggle. Herb walked down the pathway, almost in a daze, and put down the combatants without hesitation.

He stopped on the road, looked both ways, and dipped his hand in his jacket for his other gun. Lime #5 was staring him in the face, kneeling on the chest of Lime #6 with a blade squarely in his doppelganger's face. Lime #7 was close behind, as were Limes #8, 9, 10, 11…

Something in him died, snuffed like a candle. The brightness in his eyes extinguished, Herb aimed and fired. Aimed and fired. Aimed and fired. Fired. Fired…

XXX

"Kodachi Kuno blocks an ambitious offensive form challenger Akane Tendo with her brother! Is that even legal?"

"A thousand pardons, milady," Tatewaki professed, "but thy lovely-"

Akane lined up her hoop with the kendoist's face and punted the plastic frame. Kuno sailed out of the arena, and the hoop shattered. "Clubs!" she called again, and Sayuri threw the last pair of wooden clubs over the edge of the ring.

Much as Kodachi hated to admit it, even with her own distinct advantages, Akane and she were evenly matched. "You shall not best me, wench," she said, abandoning prose. "I am Kodachi Kuno, and you have taken from me my Ranma!"

"You're going down!" Akane howled, and renewed her offensive.

XXX

Shampoo opened her eyes warily, only daring to look around when she was certain that Herb had not remained. Whatever divine coincidence had landed her alone, she wasn't going to waste it. She reached with her hands into her waistband, fiddled around with malletspace, and came up with a machete, one of many things she had 'liberated' from Mousse's stash. It was a bit unwieldy for her original plan, which was to use it like a marlinspike to untie her knots and gain a surprise advantage over her captor. Fortunately, there was a plan B.

Shampoo swiped the ropes open, and when she was once again free, the first of the shots outside were already ringing in the dead air. Not wasting any time, the Amazon warrior stealthily crept down the hallway to Nabiki's room. She pushed the door open silently, praying to Beryl it wouldn't squeak, but that particular noise came from herself, when she saw what was happening.

Nabiki looked at Shampoo. Ryoga looked at Shampoo. Shampoo mentally edited the last ten seconds from her mind as quickly as she could before drawing, of all things, a bottle of shampoo.

"Still!" she commanded in her limited Japanese, and though Nabiki had no compunctions about jumping through the window, Ryoga tried to put his pants on first. It was all the time she needed. With one deft strike, Shampoo slammed her fingertips into Ryoga's scalp and massaged the shampoo in. It was Amazon brew, and like all Amazon hair care products, was guaranteed to render the user's hair thick and full for a lifetime, even if it had the disconcerting side-effect of changing its colour.

But this one was different. Ryoga's eyes glazed over, and in less than four seconds, Shampoo was on step two.

"You kill Ranma!"

XXX

Herb was literally surrounded on all sides by corpses, the body count rising at an alarming rate. Lime #36 lasted no longer than his cousins before Herb shot him dead in the street. The dull _click_ signified a lack of bullets, and Herb took the opportunity to reload. There were no other visible Limes, but soldier's mentality dictated constant vigilance. With an air of distaste, Herb levitated himself a foot into the sky and floated over the carnage.

He was on the lawn of the Tendo home when the reality of what he'd done hit him full in the face. Herb fell to the ground and vomited his lunch everywhere. He threw one of his guns as far away as he could manage, but the other was buried in the dirt by his own weight. _'What the hell have I done?'_ he thought. Reality was becoming a little hazy. _'I just killed Lime, and Lime, and Lime, and Lime…'_

Here Herb's fragile grip on reality would have splintered completely had not Nabiki, naked save for a T-shirt that was just long enough to cover the important bits, jumped out a window. She rolled on the lawn, grabbed Herb by his elbow, and yanked the dragon warrior out of the way as Ryoga, who was completely naked, jumped out after her and sprinted down the road, ignorant of the Chinese corpses littering the avenue.

Herb's last thought was _'Why did he have an ere-'_ before he entered blue-screen mode.

Shampoo, sitting on the windowsill of Nabiki's bedroom, laughed. "I not done," she promised, and pointed her shotgun at the prone Musk warrior.

Almost as if to spite them, it began to rain. Water sputtered down gutters and into the street, washing the blood of thirty-six warriors into the gutters. Herb's hair bled from black to silver, and Nabiki felt the body mass change.

_'We are so fucked,'_ she thought poignantly.

XXX

"And Akane Tendo is the winner!" the referee screamed. The stands erupted into chaos, and Akane dodged out of the ring as Kodachi tried to take her head off with the razor hoop again.

"Furinkan High has taken the title of Champion!" the referee continued, oblivious to the obvious infraction of rules taking place not two feet in front of her.

"Let's scat," Sayuri suggested, shouldering the still-sleeping Ranma and pointing to the exit. Kodachi, blinded by rage, was now armed with her custom mallet and was smashing it aimlessly around the ring. Akane jumped out, sticking her tongue out at the audience, and together the three remaining members of the Furinkan Gymnastics Team fled the building.

It was raining outside, which didn't surprise them at all. What _did_ surprise Akane was Ryoga. He was stark naked, holding a red umbrella over his head. His eyes were noticeably glazed, and his hair was wild. Sayuri took an unconscious step back.

"Give me Ranma," he said in a cold voice.

XXX

Kasumi eventually decided on making fish. It was a dish she was good at, which was saying something. She put the requisite ingredients in her shopping basket, paid the shopkeeper, and stepped outside. It was sprinkling lightly, but she didn't care. Kasumi's world consisted almost exclusively of sunshine and rainbows. Of course, when she neared her home, she was passed by a pink-and-black blur, which she dismissed.

The bodies, however…

"Oh, my!"

**Bwa-ha-ha! I am either evil or deluded! YOU CHOOSE!**


	8. Lime Wedges

**Sing it with me!**

**Roses are red,**

**Violets are blue,**

**I'm schizophrenic,**

**And so am I!**

* * *

Sayuri nearly dropped Ranma on the ground. It was in part due to fear, but mostly because she was shaking so badly that she doubted her ability to stay standing would last much longer. She back up slightly, sweat and rainwater soaking into her scanty gymnast's uniform, but Ryoga was behind her, running to intercept her so fast Sayuri could barely track his movements.

"Give me Ranma," he said again, his voice devoid of hatred and passion. Just a dead echo in the lost boy's throat. Sayuri looked fearfully over at Akane Tendo, who was twitching faintly. "N…n-n-n…" she tried, but the word wouldn't come out of her throat. Ryoga smiled thinly and reached out for his prize, and Sayuri was powerless to defend her teammate.

Akane kicked Ryoga in the face. The naked boy stumbled backwards, trading defensive power for the umbrella over his head, which mystified the part of Sayuri's mind that wasn't howling silently in fear. "Piss off, Ryoga," Akane growled, "I'm not in the mood for this."

Ryoga placed his umbrella carefully in his left hand and attacked Akane ferociously. Even handicapped and mesmerized, Ryoga was still leaps and bounds ahead of Akane in martial abilities, and two quick strikes to Akane's body dispatched her neatly. The youngest Tendo fell back, hands on her abdomen as she quickly reassessed the situation. "Run," she advised her companion. "Take Ranma back home."

You really didn't need to tell her twice. With a strangled squeak, Sayuri ran. Ryoga chuckled humorlessly and set himself into a fighting stance. "Do you think you can hide that bastard from me? I _always_ find Ranma Saotome."

"Don't look down on me!" Akane screamed, and attacked. Ryoga countered her first few probing strikes easily. The skilled fighter contemptuously parried every jab with his unhindered wrist, not backing up a centimeter, nor taking his eyes off of Akane's. When she overextended, Ryoga sidestepped and her own momentum tossed Akane into the muddy field. It was raining in earnest now, and when she wiped the dirty water off of her face Akane was bright red with anger.

"You bore me," Ryoga said honestly, and kicked her. Akane went sprawling in the field, sliding on the slick grass. Ryoga turned and walked away, his skin shining with the rain's reflection. Akane hauled herself to her feet again and attacked him from behind, going for a kick to the back of the head. Somehow, Ryoga twisted so as to keep the umbrella over his head, but the kick missed entirely and carried her over Ryoga's shoulder. He elbowed her in the gut, and the miserable feeling spread from her lungs to her stomach.

"Get off of me," he demanded, and Akane did so. She stood up, back to her opponent, and spin-kicked at his head again. Ryoga dodged it easily, but the lash of her heel dragged the umbrella away from its position. When she recovered her balance, Akane found that Ryoga was gone. He'd vanished completely, leaving only his red umbrella behind. She tried to pick it up, but the thing was heavier than it looked. She settled on dragging it a few feet through the mud for spite, then ran to catch up with Sayuri.

XXX

"What did you do?" Nabiki groused, poking the heir to the Musk dynasty square in her bosom. Herb shivered, her silvery hair plastered against her head in heavy ropes. "I went to a bad place," she murmured, trembling horribly. Nabiki sighed and walked to the edge of their shelter, looking out. It was a tree; large enough and tall enough to keep most of the rain off of her little pity party, and just thin enough to provide zero wind resistance. Nabiki regretted her choice of clothing, but consoled herself with the though that Ryoga had it worse. _That_ almost made her smile, until she caught sight of another Lime walking by.

"I went to a bad place," Herb said faintly, and Nabiki felt like slamming her head against a wall. She stepped adroitly to cover Herb's sight from the tiger warrior clone, who was the ultimate reason for this little fiasco. As she watched, entranced, Lime #42 spasmed in the street and spawned Lime #43. Then Lime #43 created Lime #44, and all three Limes started to shake again, and now there were six. Herb reached into her boot and pulled out a kunai, muscles straining to hold herself back from committing genocide.

"_Please_," she hissed, the little knife rising to eye level. "_Please, move_." She threw the kunai. It whistled past Nabiki's ear, spinning like a drill, and sank halfway into Lime #44's head. Her former bodyguard's double opened his mouth to scream and died. Nabiki threw herself out of the way, and Herb let out a whooping cry as she hurled herself into combat once again. A ki blast, focused to laser intensity, burned a hole in Lime #42's torso, the stench of burning flesh alerting the second Lime to the threat. His face lit up at the sight of Lord Herb's, but that disappeared as Herb smashed his forearm into the unfortunate man's throat, followed by snapping his neck.

Herb let out an animalistic howl and sank to her knees, sobbing disconsolately in the rain. Now even Nabiki was scared out of her wits. In less than her week, the laws of reality had been rewritten, and Genma had brought death and destruction to her doorstep. She had had _enough_.

"Where the fuck do you get off?" she shouted through the rain. Herb didn't look up from the body of Lime #43, whose neck was twisted at an odd angle. "LOOK AT ME!" she shouted again, marching up to Herb, and suddenly the dragoness smashed her flat on her back, another kunai pressed to her throat. Herb was looking at a place just beyond her left ear, and locks of hair were dangling in her eyes. Nabiki struggled and cursed and bit and scratched, but Herb didn't move a muscle. Suddenly, the lights clicked on. Herb dropped the knife with a muted clatter and backed away, horrified. Nabiki scrambled to a semi-sitting position, hoping to defend herself from the next psychotic attack, but Herb was already running away.

She ran past a corner store, and with a shriek another Lime was hammered down. And another. The pistols were soaked through, useless, and all of her knifes were gone, but Herb still managed to reach evermore staggering heights of bloodshed. The Limes were dogpiling her now, and Nabiki was brushed by one from behind as he ran to join his doomed copies.

With a roar, a gout of flame lanced into the sky. Thousands of years of inbred preservation instinct made Nabiki run away like every sane person already had, leaving the Limes to their collective fate. A shower of AB-positive coated every square inch of the surrounding streets in pinkish red, which the rain soon dulled to almost nothing, and Princess Herb emerged. Her eyes flamed a deep crimson, flames wreathing her in a corona of sizzling death. Two massive wings, each a covered in light pink scales, jutted from torn holes in the back of her combat regalia, and they beat against the air restlessly.

Every Lime infesting Tokyo shuddered and panicked.

Nabiki ran into Dr. Tofu's clinic, racing past the bewildered doctor in her rush to hide in the back room. She settled on the bathroom, shutting the door and locking herself in. Dr. Tofu caught up and pounded frantically on the frame. "Nabiki," he asked as calmly as possible, "why are you half naked and hiding in my bathroom?"

"G-go away!" Nabiki managed. "Run before they get here!" Dr. Tofu sighed and jiggled the handle fruitlessly. "I need details," he said needlessly. "Come on, Nabiki, talk to me. What's got you shaken up?"

"Herb… there's this guy… Chinese, and he duplicates… there were thousands… and Herb is killing them all…"

Clearly she was insensate; Dr. Tofu decided to keep Kasumi's sister in his clinic anyways, until she was back to her cold, clinical self. He left her alone, small gasping noises issuing from the doorway, and went back to the reception desk. It was peaceful for all of thirty seconds as the chiropractor contemplated calling Soun about his daughter. Then a massive wall of pure ki slammed a wave of bodies into the front windows of his practice. _Identical_ bodies.

XXX

Genma slipped the Chinese man into a kimura and wrenched his shoulder callously until the scapula was mulched. Tossing the screaming man aside, he turned on the second of his attackers, a strange clone of the first, and punched him in the face. The man weathered the blow seemingly well for a while, then fell to the ground with a stunned expression. Behind him, Soun whirled a janitor's mop like a naginata around his head and neck, incidentally felling several other of the strange clones. Genma dropped the last one on his side and whirled around to flank Soun's small army of adversaries.

Nearby, the younger siblings of several St. Hebereke students were cowering in a circle as Tatewaki Kuno, dual wielding his ever-present bokken and a shinai borrowed from the home team's kendo club, knocked back his own opponents. There were only two, but both of them were warriors of equal caliber with the Blue Thunder. Kuno had the sinking sense that the strangely dressed foreigners had taunted him into a fight and were now toying with him. He spun the shinai in his left hand past one clone's guard in a general block, followed by an upward strike with the bokken in his right. The man stopped the attack with a well-timed ninja clap that threw Kuno off balance. One of the boys winced as his partner punched Kuno rapidly in the chest.

Just when blood was beginning to fly, a pink ribbon lanced across the battlefield and wrapped itself around Lime's elbow. With an effortless tug, the razor-sharp weapon slid neatly behind the joint and through sinew and muscle. Lime's forearm dropped to the ground, blood spurting from the stump, and Kodachi finished the job with a spiked club. Lime #168 feebly deflected the first few jabs, but weakened by the lack of blood, an especially skilled attack landed a spike directly between his eyebrows. He stumbled away, roaring and raging but unable to fight.

"That was… unexpectedly violent of you, sister dearest," Kuno said, recovering his composure. "I had thought that your ribbon was forbidden by the judges ruling in 1967 for unnecessary evisceration and excessive force."

"So was this," Kodachi said, and slammed a syringe into the stomach of Lime #201. He ran away, clawing at his face and screaming **"My eyes! MY EYES!"** Kuno winced, and the children "_ooooh_ed."

"These foul, soulless demons multiply within water like plague," Kodachi growled, coiling her ribbon around her wrist again. "Feel no shame in ending them, for they merely return to the pits that spawned them."

"Aye, I too have met with their astounding power," Kuno agreed. "But to what do you refer by… oh…"

Kodachi passed him a katana. It could typically be found hung over the fireplace in the Kuno estate, but Kuno knew that it was live and dangerous: he'd sharpened it to a fine edge himself. With something akin to reverence, Kuno discarded his training weapons and armed himself with the sword. "Come, brother dearest," Kodachi said, grinning darkly. "Let us whet our blades on the blood of demons, for the enemies of our ancestors walk among us once more."

It was a bit fruity and purple even for Kodachi, master of inane soliloquies, but Kuno let it slide. There were psychotic devils to slay, and more by the minute if the rain was any indication.

XXX

Kasumi carefully picked her way p the street and into her house, where she slammed the door shut and locked it behind her. Sighing with relief, the eldest Tendo resisted the urge to slump against the door an instead rushed to the kitchen, where she hoped to stow the groceries before anything _else_ catastrophic happened. She quickly stashed the food in the freezer and was ready to hide under her bed when a Lime stopped her in her tracks.

"I here, wait for you," he said in mutilated Japanese. Kasumi's heart stopped. "I Lime, greatest Musk warrior!" he proclaimed proudly. "We have long tradition, powerful males, no meet females until coming-of-ages ceremony." He smiled, showing off thick, long canine teeth. "I man now," he continued, advancing slowly, "but Lord leave China before we come-of-age. Now here. I no see women before. See?"

Kasumi saw all right. She backed away slowly, feeling behind herself for something, anything on the counter that could hurt, maim, kill, or perform an impromptu vasectomy. "I ready," Lime said, "you?" Kasumi's hand hit something, and her heart started again. It didn't matter, not important, _please work_…

"Molest _this_!" she shrieked, throwing it at the Lime clone. It made her cringe as soon as she said it, but the kettle sailed true. It hit the unsuspecting Lime square on the head, and a trickle of hot water dribbled out. With a rustle of clothing, Lime vanished. The kettle hit the floor with a clatter and rolled out of sight. Kasumi stared at the now-empty air before, willing her breathing to calm down.

Then she threw open drawers, cabinets, cupboards, and retrieved a grand total of four kettles. She topped them all off and set the burning on the stove, a thoughtful glint in her eyes. If it worked _once_…

XXX

Herb killed a Lime. He died quickly, resigned to his fate as soon as he saw the rampaging dragon descending upon him. She roared again, and the sound echoed across all of Nerima. A soft thump reached her ears, and Herb looked around at Shampoo, who had leaped from a building to ground level. She pointed the shotgun at Herb, and the irate dragoness flicked one hand to end the firearm spinning away. She raised one eyebrow challengingly, and Shampoo obliged.

**"I will not rest until you are DEAD, DEMON-WHORE!"** she shouted, and attacked. Herb held up one hand and tendrils of chakra shot from the wings on her back, wrapping around all of Shampoo's limbs and holding her aloft. She struggled, cursing Herb and her own luck as the wires held. Then she slumped, energy spent.

**"I give up,"** she lamented. **"I am… I **_**was**_** the brightest of my generation, but **_**you**_**… I cannot win. Even when I dispense of weapons, fight with honour and valour, cunning and trickery, every playing field is somehow to your advantage. You have everything I don't, which is why you win and win again, princess."**

Herb's eyes widened, and she gestured quickly to drag Shampoo the distance between them. The lotus chakra on her forehead was glowing brightly. **"So you understand, do you?"** Shampoo murmured. **"Well then, it is already too late."**

And Mousse stepped from the shadows and struck.

**This arc will wrap up in the next chapter or two. Of course, even then, I just _know_ this story is going to take forever to finish. Ah well, _aimez-vous_!**


	9. Cheating Like A Looser

**An inordinate number of characters in this story are currently naked. Wait for it…**

The gymnasium was devoid of combat, although people remained. Soun Tendo and Genma Saotome were both there, recovering from a strenuous fight against the army of Limes. The comrades in suffering were comparing cuts and bruises like war wounds, content to wait for the rain to stop before venturing outside.

Nearby, Tatewaki Kuno was running himself through a few of the more complex katana escrima with his blade, the keen edge making a pleasing hum as it shredded the air to imaginary ribbons. Kodachi watched him work, herself armed to the teeth with toxins and an unhealthy number of sharp objects. She found it amusing that her brother had spent the last few minutes protecting a handful of children from the strange invasion of demons, particularly given his rather unorthodox view of said children.

Especially the girls.

"We have a problem," Soun called over to them, and while Kuno was too deeply entrenched in his kata to hear him, Kodachi eagerly sauntered over and peered over the older man's shoulder. "What is the nature of your conundrum?" she asked pleasantly, and Soun pointed at the Lime beneath his feet. As Kodachi watched, she quickly realized that the Chinese tribesman wasn't dead, but extremely close to it. "Interesting. Would you like my assistance in finishing this one's miserable existence?"

Soun shook his head. "Watch," he said shortly, and grabbed a bucket of dirty water from the janitor's trolley. He poured it over the dying Lime, and immediately Lime #1472 sprang into being next to him. The new Lime lasted only moments before Kodachi skewered him through his neck. He fell over, gurgling incoherently as he choked on his own blood, and Soun gave Kodachi a droll stare.

"Jusenkyo," Genma said, and both Soun and Kodachi looked at his sharply. "It's a curse," he elaborated. "This one must have fallen in a spring that duplicates him in cold water. Which means…" he grabbed a bottle of superheated cleaning fluid and dumped it over the dying Lime. He vanished instantly, his clothes collapsing into loose piles that shrank away to nothing.

"So these monsters are defeated by hot water, yet aided by cold?" Kodachi mused. "Yet the sky cries even as we quibble… this may prove problematic to combat."

"Verily, sister. I offer thee the advice I heed: do not trifle with such powerful magic," Kuno warned. "If it is to be the four of us, great though our talents be, to drive out this foreign menace, we shall require a surplus of forethought and auspicious timing."

"A plan and luck," Kodachi translated. Soun looked interested, and Genma left to go boil more water. The sole living Lime remaining in the gym blacked out from blood loss, his bodily functions slowing gradually.

"I propose that both you and your fellow fist-fighter traverse the streets and search for the means to turn the tide of this war in our favour. Mine sister shall search Nerima and beyond for those of our caliber to join with our noblest of causes, while I escort the children in my care back to the safety of the Kuno estate."

A vein popped out on Kodachi's temple, forcing her eyelid to twitch at regular intervals. "Brother," she said with a forced measure of calm, "perhaps it ought be you to recruit fellow martial artists to our struggle while _I_ escort the young and infirm to safety."

"Nonsense!" Kuno boomed. "Children are my constant companions, their light piecing the drudgery of dull, dull existence like only the fierce tigress can. For like petals of a dying rose-"

"I will be cooking dinner tonight," said Kodachi, and Tatewaki shuddered.

"Alas," he addressed the assorted kids clustered against the wall, "I shall be without my walls these coming hours in a glorious crusade against evil! My twisted sister, the Black Rose, shall be thine guide to shelter from the storm!"

Genma returned, carrying a kettle of hot water, and he and Soun left to secure the Tendo house and dojo. Kuno was soon off as well, dramatically unsheathing his katana and proclaiming his bloodlust before running off into the rain like a man who saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Kodachi gave the motley crew of surviving children a withering glare. "Hide," she instructed shortly, and sprinted off to join her brother.

XXX

Sayuri, panting and out of breath, slid to a stop in a field of grass nestled inside a triangle of streets. She dumped Ranma off of her shoulder, swearing profusely, and rubbed her arms. "So cold outside," she hissed, "why is it so cold?"

"Maybe because it's raining?" Akane quipped. "Jeez, way to point out the obvious."

"Akane, I know you're a hardcore martial artist, but we just ran ten clicks in the freezing rain! And I had to carry this useless sack of guts on my shoulder too!"

Akane pouted. "Then why didn't you go into a building or something?"

"Because we have a homicidal maniac after Ranma's head on our tail, maybe?" said the increasingly irritated Sayuri. "Did we loose him?"

"After the first couple hundred meters, yes," confirmed Akane. Sayuri mimed strangling her bluenette companion, and Akane laughed tiredly. Then there was a _bwee_, and P-chan walked by.

"P-chan!" Akane cried. "Oh, what are you doing out in the rain? Why has Nabiki abandoned you? You're _sooo_ cold! Oh, she's a bad owner, yes she is, _yes she is_, isn't she widdle P-chan, you- OUCH!" She threw the black piglet off of herself when the irate animal bit her forearm. Sayuri sniggered. "Smooth, Akane," she said, receiving a dark glare in return. P-chan shook himself indignantly and wandered aimlessly in Sayrui's general direction.

"Hey, there's Dr. Ono's practice!" Akane pointed the small chiropractor storefront. "Let's go inside and wait out the storm."

"AAAAAGH, DAMN IT! WHAT THE-AAAGH!" Ranma screamed. P-chan, it seemed, had snuck up on her in her sleep and bitten her on the ear. The entire side of her head was pasted red and green from blood and grass stains, and when Ranma had awoken once again, her self-proclaimed hated rival had bit her again, this time on the nose. Tiny teeth marks were sunken into the tender flesh, and that was bleeding profusely. She tottered around, freezing in her skimpy gymnastic's leotard, and managed to locate a yen coin.

"HAPPOGOENSATSU!" Ranma screamed, pain pounding in her head, and P-chan flopped over in a dead faint as his energy was sucked into Ranma. _All_ of it. Ranma expected the piglet to have the ki of a piglet, so the mass of life energy in influx through her coin made the petite redhead shoot up two feet in the blink of an eye. Her leotard exploded into scraps of fabric instantly, which would have given Ryoga a lethal nosebleed had he been awake.

"Whad da hellb wath dat?" Ranma roared in her falsetto. "Sombe kind ob killer flowerth?" Sayuri burst out laughing at the sight, doubled over in the rain at the sight of the raging guy-turned-girl.

"Maybe we should get into Dr. Tofu's practice?" Akane suggested neutrally, biting back her own giggling fit. "I'm sure we can figure out what to do with P-chan after we deal with Ryoga." Ranma nodded, and Sayuri noticed that the lighting made her face, covered in blood and contorted with rage, look positively demonic. Kodachi looked tame in comparison.

They crossed the road quickly, miraculously failing to encounter any Limes or their corpses on the way, and pushed their way inside. Dr. Tofu looked up from the paperwork on his desk at the two scantily clad gymnasts and their naked, bloody companion, and professionally averted his gaze.

"Hello again, Akane," he said to the wall beside her. "Your sister Nabiki is in my bathroom and doesn't want to come out. Could you maybe persuade her to let some of my other patients relieve themselves?"

"Sure thing Doctor Tofu!" Akane agreed earnestly, striding past his desk and depositing the limp body of P-chan in front of him. The doctor stared at it for a moment, then looked at Sayrui. "Is this what I think it is?" he asked cautiously, and Sayuri shrugged. "I don't even know what _I _think it is."

"How much doeth it cotht to put down a pig?" Ranma demanded. Dr. Tofu sighed and daintily shifted the unconscious animal off of his desk. "I have spare clothing in the closet in my examination room," he informed Ranma. "Please dress appropriately for five minutes from now."

Ranma left too, leaving Sayuri with a man she knew very little about. "So," she asked suddenly, "did you know that Akane has a crush on you?"

"Yes."

"A monstrous, raging-"

"_Yes._"

XXX

Herb spun around so fast she vanished into her own afterimage and kicked Mousse in the chest, driving him back. The chakra lines ensnaring Shampoo retreated with their prey, hauling Shampoo higher into the shadows and rain above. Herb fanned her fingers, and talons of ki sprouted from their tips. Mousse backed up nervously.

**"I wish only peace between us, Lord Haabu,"** he said formally. **"I merely wish to take Shampoo from you. Surely you can see how beneficial this might be for the both of us. She will cease to attack you, and I will have my beloved again."**

**"NO! STUPID MU TSU! DON'T LET HER GET AWAY, KILL THIS BITCH!"** Shampoo thrashed against her bonds, but Princess Herb's instructors had done their jobs well. The otherworldly energy stayed firm.

**"Please!"** Mousse pleaded. **"Give me my Shampoo back!"**

Herb stared at him for a long moment. **"I will do as you say, in the interests of both our tribes,"** she acquiesced, turning away from the man. Mousse smiled darkly and withdrew a porcelain training potty. Shampoo's heart swelled with pride, though _why_ she had no idea.

"Fist of the White Swan!" Mousse shouted in Japanese, and smashed the swan against the back of Herb's head. She tumbled, her concentration breaking, and the restraining power faded. Now smiling herself, Shampoo dropped to the ground with catlike agility and together the Joketsuzoku warriors engaged the dragon. Herb backed herself into a corner and fought Shampoo hand-to-hand while trying to keep an eye on Mousse. While she was easily better than Shampoo, Mousse was the significantly better of the two.

Mousse reached into his sleeves and unleashed his opening attack: a barrage of chains, ropes, wires, knives, bolts, feathers, bottles, another swan-shaped training potty, two firecrackers that somehow lit themselves, streamers, kunai, scarves, and a medicine cabinet. Most of it was ill timed and useless, but the ropes struck true.

Herb's wings and arms were suddenly bound to her body, leaving only her legs open. Her eyes widening in panic, the dragoness dispatched Shampoo with a wheel kick that sent her crashing through the wall and into a dry cleaner's back room. Then she turned to Mousse. **"I will skin you alive, honorless bastard,"** she promised, and Mousse chuckled.

**"I don't doubt,"** he confided, reaching ominously into his robes. **"You are indeed the best of your kind, a boundless gap of training, determination, and bloodline separates us."** He withdrew a pacifier. **"That's why I came prepared."**

Mousse looked hilarious as he carefully bit on the rubber nipple, wedging it carefully between his lips. Herb looked at it curiously, failing to move even when a sphere of heated ki gathered at the ring of the pacifier. With a terrifying _whoosh_, a fireball the size of a midsized sedan rushed down the alleyway, setting every flammable object aflame. Shampoo popped out of the rubble, her hair burning slowly but surely, and raced off into the rain in a panic.

When the dust cleared, Mousse rubbed dirt off of his glasses and looked again. There was Herb, no worse for the wear and looking distinctly smug. **"You mistake me for someone who isn't fireproof,"** she said, and opened her own mouth. There was a brief distortion, and another ball of fire licked its way down the alley towards the hapless Joketsuzoku warrior.

Mousse rummage desperately in his sleeves for his other secret weapons, of which he had many, but was too late to withdraw his fireproof umbrella. The fire washed over him completely, and while his burn were relatively minor, the sheer weight of objects within his robes only accelerated the process. In less than a minute of darkness and heat, Mousse stood naked in the rain, surrounded by piles and piles of his armory.

**"Oh bite me,"** he groaned, and Herb smashed his head into the wall. He put up no resistance, and was soon trussed up by his own rope. **"You've made a mistake, coming here,"** Herb warned, tightening the last knot. **"You will set an example for those who would rob me of my peace."**

She dug through the stack of weapons, carefully avoiding the more dangerous items, until she found what she was looking for.

**"The powers of these are legendary, even amongst the Musk. Feel ashamed that I allow you to live."** She snatched Mousse's coke-bottle glasses off of his nose and replaced them with the Lens of Invincibility. Quickly averting her gaze from the fearsome weapon, Herb replaced the lifted lenses over the magical opera glasses and ran away.

XXX

Kasumi threw her last cupful of hot water at the nth Lime intruder in her home. Nothing happened. The Musk warrior smiled slightly and sat down in a kitchen chair, lounging like he'd been there the whole time. Kasumi, who was feeling rather flustered by the countless attempts on her life_[virginity]_ that she was entirely unsure of how to react. She tentatively punched the man in the side of the head, and Lime tossed her a withering glare.

"Do not test me," he growled, brushing his vest back to reveal a holster and gun strapped to his hip, something noticeably absent from the rest of the Lime clones. Kasumi backed up sharply into the counter, bumping hard against the wall. "Why… why didn't you go away?" she asked.

"I am the original," said Lime #1, waving his hands over his body. "Stupid Jusenkyo curse." He had a thick accent, but his Japanese was much better than Shampoo's. Kasumi suspected that he would sound fearsome in Mandarin, but in Japanese he sounded like a choking burn victim on life support.

"Ah…" Kasumi stumbled, "can you stop them?"

"No. Can only wait for rain to stop." Lime sighed and pulled his gun out. "If I die, they do. Is all."

"No! Eh heh, don't do that!" Kasumi waved her hands frantically at the suicidal man. "I'm sure father and Genma can deal with your clones, not to mention the police."

"Is raining."

"Yes, there is that," Kasumi agreed. "Well, for now, would you like tea?"

"Please. You have gyokuro?"

As Kasumi prepared the tea, Lime stowed his gun and ran his hands though his hair. "What happens now?" he asked himself. "I made problem by coming here for lord, so my fault. By time rain over, will be too many Limes. Thousands, even."

"Oh my, that is a problem," Kasumi said, switching burners with the kettle. "So I guess the question is: what are you going to do about it?"

Lime looked down at his gun slowly…

XXX

**"No, Xian Pu!"** Mousse called. **"Don't come any closer!" **Shampoo snorted and flicked her hair out of her eyes to see better in the rain. Why Stupid Mousse was trussed like a chicken was beyond her; she'd assumed that Herb had killed him already.

**"Stupid Mu Tsu,"** she jeered, **"you've been beaten by a dirty Musk dog! You call yourself a warrior? I call you pathetic!"**

**"Stay away!"** Mousse urged, but Shampoo took one more step and saw the glasses on his face. A wash of power emanated from Mousse's face and coated Shampoo. The violet-haired girl dropped to her knees and burst into remorseful tears. **"I'm horrible to you,"** she wailed, and Mousse groaned.

**"Just look away,"** he advised, but Shampoo wasn't listening.

**"I treat you like dirt, and you just take it and keep smiling, like some kind of IDIOT! Why, why can't you be happy in life? You deserve better than me!"**

**"You are all I ever wanted, Xian Pu,"** Mousse said kindly, and Shampoo cried even harder as the mask wormed its way insidiously into her mind.

**"I try to push you away but you won't have any of it! I beat you, I hurt you, I use you, and- WHY, MU TSU?"**

** "You're overrea-"**

** "I DESERVE TO DIE!"**

** "Calm dow-"**

** "KILL ME, PLEASE! I DON'T DESERVE TO LIVE!"**

** "Xian Pu…"**

**"WAAAAAAH!"**


	10. Meetings

_Diary of Ranma Saotome: Year 10, Day 267_

_I can't believe I slept through everything!_

XXX

"I have a plan!" Lime announced. "Simple, easy to do."

"Oh?" Kasumi inquired pleasantly. "What might that be?"

"Is cold water to _make_ twins, and rain is cold. But if rain is hot, twins disappear. Problem is, how to make rain hot?"

"That _is_ a conundrum," Kasumi admitted, sipping her tea carefully. "What did you have in mind for that?"

"I… not sure how to explain in Japanese," Lime admitted sheepishly. "Was not my best subject in school. But plan have Lord Herb use… energy? Energy. Heat clouds above your house, and attract all clones under hot rain."

Kasumi nodded. "Clever of you, Mr. Lime. I don't suppose you'll be done before dinner is served? I would hate for everyone to miss it and waste all my cooking."

"Is not a problem, if we can find Lord Herb. Dragons breathe fire, he can heat the clouds. Do you know where he is?" Lime hadn't actually thought of that until just then, and it certainly put a dent in his scheme. In fact, there was something _else_ that might be an itsy-bitsy problem in the future. Like, swimming across the Sea of Japan. It took three days solid to cross, and if the clones had a few seconds down time before becoming their own twins, that was…

More Limes than anybody could possibly handle. The original swallowed nervously and opened his mouth to voice his concerns…

… but before he made a peep, Lord Herb literally kicked down the front door, her right hand wrapped tightly in Shampoo's purple. The insensate Amazon was being dragged by the dragoness she'd sworn to kill back into the Tendo house, where Lime was sure that Herb was probably going to be less than lenient. Then Herb caught sight of his bodyguard and his face contorted into a furious snarl. She raised one hand, enveloping it in a layer of white ki, and prepared to wipe another Lime off the face of the earth.

Kasumi interposed herself between Lime and certain doom. She was frowning slightly. "None of that," she admonished. "This young man is the original Lime, you see, and I would hate to see you kill your friend." Herb lowered her hand, conceding the point, though Lime didn't know if it was because of what Kasumi said, or because it was her saying it.

**"I have a plan to get rid of the clones,"** he told Herb, and the heiress cocked her head to one side. Lime noticed that her hair was the wrong colour, but brushed it off. **"Here's what you have to do…"**

XXX

"I STRIKE!" Kuno shouted, his katana gleaming brightly as it sliced halfway through Lime #994's neck. It wasn't a clean blow, leaving the head hanging half off of the stump of a neck, but it got the job done. The Lime died in a spurt of blood and a hiss of escaping air, and Tatewaki turned to the next clone. He was becoming increasingly aware of a sharp decrease in the skill levels of clones he faced as time wore on. The last one he'd killed was a glorified meat shield, and the remaining Limes on the avenue were running scared.

Although he couldn't have known it, after the initial division between Lime #1 and Lime #2 (now deceased), the ki of the clones was shared between them equally. As more and more Limes died at the hands of the skilled martial artists of Nerima, their energy stagnated in their corpses until hot water returned the bodies to aether and their energy to Lime #1. Sadly for the identical army, the majority of their dead comrades were stuck out in the rain. As the fight wore on, therefore, Limes found themselves weakening exponentially into pale versions of themselves.

Kuno decapitated another fleeing Lime, this time completely severing the head from the body. Something primal was emerging in Kuno now, a deeply repressed reptilian instinct to fight or fly. The Blue Thunder was slipping slowly into a barbaric bloodlust, and his final war cry of "I STRIKE!" was followed by an animalistic howl of delight. His kendo armor soaked completely, almost doubling its weight, Kuno felt the heavy gear fall into the back of his mind as he charged up and down the streets of Nerima, blindly felling Lime twins as he went and leaving a black trail of blood in his wake.

As he neared the outskirts of Nerima, near the go-train line out of the city, a pitiful moaning reached his ears from behind a dry cleaner's building. The place was destroyed, one wall collapsed in-to-out and the roof caved on the same side, and Tatewaki jumped to the conclusion that the foul sorcerer from China had done it during his bestial rampage through fair Tokyo. He dropped his guard, letting the tip of his now-dulled blade to drag casually against the ground. Sparks jumped from the point of contact as he stalked into the back alley, prepared to jump to attention at a moment's notice.

"Look away!" insisted a voice in accented Japanese, and Kuno, in his usual contrary manner, searched around for the source of the voice. He found it in a man, not much older than he, bound and naked near the end of the alley. His only distinguishing features were his exotically long hair and the pair of opera glasses affixed to his face behind a more regular pair of optics. "That fiend!" Kuno cried, mysteriously retaining his ability to spout prose like an English bard. "What has the duplicating sorcerer done to thee?" The bound man struggled more violently against the ropes, incidentally smashing into a pile of weapons that reached shoulder-high and knocking it over. A metal ball and chain skittered to a stop at Kuno's feet, accompanied by some assorted small knives and a bottle of prescription medicine. "Don't look at me!" he shouted again.

"What does cause this protest?" Kuno asked, walking carefully past the stacks and scattered piles of what must surely have been a ninja's armory. Then he looked directly into Mousse's eyes, and the three-thousand-year-old magic held within his eyeglasses seized his mind with tendrils of remorse. The bloodstained Kuno blade dropped from his hands, clattering into the mess of deadly tools. **"Fuck! Why the fuck does this happen to me?"** Mousse swore, but it was too late. Kuno dropped to his knees in front of him, his head bowed but his eyes fixed firmly on the Lens of Invincibility.

"My lovely sire!" Kuno cried. "It does pain me to see thy holy personage reduced to such lowly squalor, and by mine own hand! I see now that I am the lowliest of the scum-eating koi swimming in excrement, more unclean than the body of a sullied whore! I beg thee, end my ungrateful existence!"

Mousse, as proficient in Japanese as he was, only understood about half of Kuno's pleading, but given that it had happened three times in the past half-hour, he got the gist of it. "The least you could do if you're going to grovel is grovel in Chinese. Can't understand anything you're saying."

Kuno, playing the role of blue-blooded aristocrat to the hilt, switched languages mid-apology. **"A thousand pardons, greatest of Oriental warriors. My very method of speech offends thee! Let my tongue be torn from my mouth and my teeth be pulled and stomped in the dirt before I utter a syllable in my native language should the sounds grate upon thy wronged ears!"**

Mousse sighed. **"If you can't untie me, please, **_**please**_** switch back to Japanese."**

"I DO APOLOGIZE WITH ALL MY MIGHT FOR HAVING SHOWN YOU, MY GREATEST LORD, THE INSOLENT SIDE OF HOUSE KUNO! I BEG OF THEE TO HAVE MERCY ON THY LOYAL RETAINER!"

XXX

Akane was still talking to Nabiki in his bathroom, the drenched and unconscious piglet on his desk was starting to smell awful, and Sayuri made for terrible conversation, so Dr. Tofu excused himself from the front room under the pretext of going to check on a patient. There actually weren't any to check on, but Sayuri obliviously went on talking about Yuka's crush on Kumon, allowing him to escape. The young chiropractor decided to go look in on Ranma. He found her in a back room, fully grown, with bedsheets draped around her shoulders, which thankfully protected her modesty.

"Hello doctor," she said, looking up at him. "What's going on? One minute I was going into the gymnastics fighting competition, and then I sniffed some roses. Next thing I know, P-chan bites me on the nose and we're all out in the rain just in front of your place here."

"I don't know myself," Dr. Tofu admitted, "but there have been some strange goings-on around here. More so than usual, that is." Ranma snickered. "Tell me about it, doc. Less than a week ago, I get engaged to this Akane girl and suddenly I'm sixteen! Well, I was always sixteen, but you know what I mean."

"Actually, I _don't_ know what you mean," Dr. Tofu said. "Care to share it with me?"

"Oh, see, I didn't know I could get older like this since the day I met the Tendos. Before that, Pops just assumed that grandpa's technique stopped me from ageing, period." Ranma shrugged, causing the sheet to slip a little further down her neckline. "Not really sure what else to say there. I'm sure you'd be more interested in the whole 'ki-vacuum' thing, but to be honest I don't understand how it works at all."

"I might, if I could examine you," Dr. Tofu said. "Your ki pathways must have been reshaped by your… grandfather… but we have a slightly bigger problem."

"Oh?"

"Yes, there's an army of self-replicating Chinese warriors outside, hell-bent on killing your friend with white hair and wings. We may just have to put the examination on hold until everyone isn't in mortal peril."

Ranma shuddered involuntarily and shrunk, her body collapsing on itself and absorbing the extra flesh created by Ryoga's ki until she was, once again, a chibi-version of a great martial artist.

"White hair and wings? Doesn't ring a bell. But yer examination is gonna have to wait until ya catch me!" She jumped up and ran off, the clothes she had borrowed from Dr. Tofu's closet trailing behind in her grip. The doctor sighed and mentally reviewed his list of things to do with Ranma. It had such pleasant notions as 'update vaccinations,' 'general checkup,' 'check medical history,' and 'gynecology exam.' Now, it also had 'mental examination.' Despite technically being sixteen, Ranma had the mentality and attitude of someone who was still… six. It was stupidly obvious, but at the same time chilling to realize that Ranma was essentially a small child thrust into a relatively adult situation, without the ability to cope but _with_ the ability to lash out.

Dr. Tofu walked quickly to a desk in the room, opened the top left drawer. He pulled out a thin sheaf of paper that listed various professionals and specialists in Tokyo. He scrolled down, picking out gynecologists, gender-behavior psychologists, immunologists, and as many pediatrician/psychiatrists he could find. It was a depressingly short list.

XXX

Nabiki walked out of the bathroom, looking like a zombie, followed by Akane, who wore an expression of mixed shock and disbelief. The older Tendo shuffled out of the back of the building, making her way slowly to the waiting room, when suddenly a stinking ball of wet fur was practically thrust upon her. Sayuri looked at her expectantly for a minute, but when it became clear that nothing was going to happen anytime soon, the bored gymnast returned to pacing the hallway and muttering about the blood splatters on the front window.

"That's P-chan?" Akane said, making it sound like a question. At the sound of her beloved pet's name, Nabiki's eyes narrowed, bursting into malicious life, and she hissed under her breath. If she could have physically done so, Akane suspected that her ears would be narrowed against her head. She held the bundle of water-suffused porcine cuteness up at eye level and shook him hard enough to rattle his brains.

P-chan opened his eyes blearily. His energy hadn't fully returned at the time of his awakening, but with a telltale _whoosh_ his little heart was beating in sheer terror as the pissed eyes of Nabiki Tendo stared his down. "BWEEE!" he shouted, which might have been "WHERE ON EARTH AM I NOW?" or "RANMA, I KNOW THIS IS _YOUR_ FAULT!" in Japanese, but even in Pig, Nabiki was having none of it.

"Come with me, little piggy," she said, ever syllable promising pain. "I am going to teach you how to obey. When your mistress tells you to do something, you _do_ it."

Akane backed away slowly. "Sis, are you feeling alright?" she asked, feeling behind herself for the doorknob to the bathroom. Nabiki turned her head without moving her body to look at her and smiled. "I'm feeling just fine," she said. P-chan shivered and flailed his tiny little limbs spastically in Nabiki's grip. Whatever had been afflicting Ryoga had clearly worn off.

"Tell doc I'm fine, I'm just using the bathroom for real right now," Nabiki said, and brushed past Akane with P-chan in her grip. The door closed with a _thud_, and Akane stared at it with a blank expression. "Pervert," she muttered. Ranma ran past, stark naked and clutching a ragged old pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt sized for a man. "Pervert!" Akane said again, her temper rising. She turned away and went to the front of the clinic, suppressing her ingrained anti-Kuno reaction, and Sayuri sauntered up to her.

"_Heeeey_, I just realized that Tofu is in the back all by his lonesome, why don't you-"

"AAAH, NABIKI STOP IT!" _Smack!_ "OH GOD, PLEASE!" _CRASH!_ "WHY, NABIKI-SAMA?" _SPLASH!_ "BWEEEEEE!" _ZZZZAP!_

"…"

"Akane?" Sayuri asked hesitantly.

** "PERVERTS!"**

XXX

Herb sat on a kitchen chair, meditating comfortably in the ray of light from the kitchen's ceiling light as he gathered his exponential reserves of power and projected them into the heavens. He had resumed his normal appearance some time ago, yet his entire body was aglow with ki. The dragon warrior could instinctively feel his life force accomplishing his will, saturating the clouds above and heating their molecules to just the right temperature to undo a Jusenkyo curse.

Lime and Kasumi watched as Herb reached an equilibrium of ki expenditure, and he nodded. "Call your clones in, Lime," he said, and Lime reached out with his mind. There were certain aspects of being a tiger that he rather enjoyed, such as the superhuman strength and stamina (the ladies like that one too, actually). But one of them that had always grated on his nerves was that tigers were bound by their instincts to obey certain triggers. Most animals were, but in Lime it was especially prominent.

Scared tigers ran, angry tigers fought, curious tigers stalked, but most importantly, hungry tigers _pounced_. The Musk bodyguard sent out a powerful signal imbued with the essence of a well-seasoned steak, so strong that Herb's mouth began to water. The man wiped his mouth with a corner of his sleeve, and Lime #1 merely looked around in anticipation of the meal, though it was not to be.

Every Lime in Tokyo stopped whatever they were doing (in the case of Limes #1023, #0124, and #1027, it cost them their matches with Soun and Genma) and converged on the Tendo residence. They came in droves, racing each other atop the roofs and having laughing conversations. Even as the surviving Limes approached their doom they continued to multiply like hormonal rabbits in the rain, new Limes bursting into being with small flashed of light. These new Limes were unaware of the call of food but followed anyways, joining the flock of lemmings towards the final destination.

The first Lime to reach the house was Lime #279, who jumped from the street across the lawn to the porch but was vaporized midway by the hot rain. The Limes directly behind him were packed tightly, and though many saw the danger and tried to escape, the later Limes pushed up against them from behind in a sea of tiger-men around the house. It was a spectacle that lasted less than ten minutes as the clones of Lime drove each other to their own doom. In the kitchen, Kasumi stared out the window at the strange sight for a number of minutes until she turned away and closed the curtains. "They're all gone," she informed her guests, and Lime sighed. "Is over now," he said, "but not really. Next time cold water find me," he drew a finger across his throat.

"I'm sure we can work around that, somehow," Herb said noncommittally. He stood up and stretched his arms above his head, yawning heavily. "Can you watch Shampoo for a few minutes? I have to go and collect Mousse as well, before he escapes. I've let him suffer long enough as it is."

"I can do!" Lime submitted. Herb nodded sharply and marched out the door, followed shortly by a string of words in Mandarin that left Lime wincing. Kasumi went back to her dinner, and while she wasn't looking, Lime turned a lecherous gaze on the helpless Shampoo. **"I'm sure we'll have lots of fun together, Xian Pu,"** he whispered, and the amazon's eyes widened in terror.

"None of that!" Kasumi said without turning around. "You are both guests, I expect you to behave as such.

Lime shrugged, and Shampoo looked relieved. **"You can have Mu Tsu,"** she mouthed conspiratorially, and Lime burst out laughing. **"He's not my type,"** he mouthed back, and Shampoo rolled her eyes. **"He's nobody's type."**

**And with that, the first major arc is over! Next up, Herb and Akane vs. Azusa and Mikado!**


	11. Interlude I: Nymphomania & Kleptomania

"Why aren't you two in school?" Herb asked, checking on Mousse's rope bindings. They were still relatively tight, but the master of hidden weapons packed more surprises than a rich kid's birthday party. He managed to look indignant as the Musk lord roughly felt him down, but Shampoo looked faintly amused.

"School's out," Akane said lazily. "Seems we've found nearly two thousand corpses in Tokyo alone that are nearly identical. Care to explain that?"

"No, not really," Herb said gruffly. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Let's go do something," Ranma piped up. "There's no school, and we have a house full of people just itching to get out before someone kicks down the walls again."

"That was _once_!" Nabiki said. "Are you ever going to let me live that down?"

"Skating!" Ranma announced. "I want to go skating today!"

"That's a mite of a specific request there Ranma. Do you have skates? Do _we_ have skates? Skate where?" Akane asked.

"We have skates," Nabiki said thoughtfully, "and we have extras for Ranma and Herb, and there's a rink ten minutes away by bus. I'll go with you," she offered. "My boyfriend and I decided that we need to get out more often."

"_Ooh_, you have a boyfriend?" Akane asked. Hate boys all she like, but gossip was gossip, and this was coming from the Ice Queen of Furinkan High to boot!

"Yep. Ryoga and I are officially an item now."

"Ryoga Hibiki?" Ranma asked skeptically. "That guy… I dunno, he seems like he's a little bit too focused to be in a relationship."

_'Obsessive, maybe,'_ Nabiki thought, but shook her head. "You'd be surprised," she said evasively. "He does what I tell him to, and he's really sweet most of the time. In fact, he offered to take me out today, so we can all go together!"

Ranma panicked immediately. "No!" he shouted, jumping to his feet. Nobody really noticed, as he was below their lines of sight either way. "You can't go with him! He's a menace, and everywhere he goes he leaves destruction behind him. And he gets lost!"

"So do lots of people," Nabiki said evenly. "He has bad directional sense, which makes him even with roughly every male on the face of the planet."

"You don't understand!" Ranma insisted. "It's just not natural. He can get lost in a closet, for Pete's sake! In a room with only one door! Back in grade six, he got lost walking in a straight line!"

"You're exaggerating," said Akane. "That's just nonsense."

"Oh yeah? What do you call this? Happogoensatsu!" Soun fell over, his face sunken in a bowl of milk and soggy cereal that lay before him on the table. Nabiki reached over and flipped him before her father could drown in his breakfast. "I would really appreciate it if you never, ever used that again," she said.

"I, for one, would be happy to go skating with you," Herb said stiffly. "_All_ of you."

"I can't, you know, there's just so much to be done around the house today. You go on without me, I'm sure we can catch up some other time." Kasumi smiled sweetly.

"Whatever. I'll go get ready and grab Ryoga, then we'll go. I trust you can help them size the spare skates, Kasumi?" Her older sister nodded and went down into the basement, while Nabiki went upstairs. The remaining three finished their breakfasts quickly, but as Kasumi was coming up the stairs Akane said, "Ryoga? She has Ryoga in her room?"

"Oh dear lord," Ranma muttered.

"PERVERTS!"

XXX

Nabiki finished stuffing everything she thought they might need into a duffel bag, including an extra pair of scarves for the both of them and a small lunch. Ryoga was standing by the door, his yellow shirt replaced by a flamboyant pink coat, his ever-present red umbrella ready by his side. Nabiki nodded, and together they clambered out of her second-story window and dropped gracefully to the ground. Both of them could have easily roof-hopped to the train station, but Ryoga was much faster than Nabiki, who refused to give him the supplies, so instead they were taking the go-trains.

"Ryoga," she said suddenly, "Ranma said you have a bad sense of direction. Is that true?"

He shrugged weakly. "What can I say, Nabiki-sama? It's a family thing."

"Follow me then. Honestly, do you never ask for directions?"

She took off before he could answer, and Ryoga followed with despair sowing its first true seeds in his heart. They blasted their way to the station in a matter of minutes, neither athlete breaking a sweat, and abruptly both changes to a more reserved demeanor as they bought train tickets for Chiyoda. The train pulled in a few minutes later, and Nabiki lead Ryoga on before the two sat down and finally relaxed. Nabiki, the sharper of the two, noticed that the driver of the train didn't make an announcement as the doors closed, but paid it no mind. Ryoga gripped the side rail next to him so hard that it buckled in his grip, and Nabiki edged away from the terrified look in his eyes. "I hate trains," he murmured, and then the bullet train shot off like a rocket.

For the first few minutes, the train was underground and the scenery wasn't much to look at. Neither of them talked, until Nabiki realized that the eerie silence was due to the fact that they were the only ones in their train car. A little weird, but nothing too out of the ordinary. Ryoga, however, was now muttering a shinto prayer chant under his breath. Nabiki slapped him across the cheek. "Stop that, you superstitious moron!" she ground out, and Ryoga pointed nervously at the far window. "Look."

"WHAT THE HELL?" Nabiki screamed in shock. Outside, the landscape passing by was mountainous and snowy, an unidentifiable mountain range. They both stared as the mountains passed, then the train went back under the darkness of the tunnel. When it came out again, they were passing over East Lake, Paris, and the Eiffel Tower loomed over them. That too only lasted a few seconds, and then it was dark once again.

It was safe to say that Nabiki was freaking out, but Ryoga seemed strangely calm. "This always happens," he said, "I should have _known_ this was going to happen again. Ahh, well, nothing to do about it."

"WHAT?" Nabiki shouted again, not caring that they were the only ones on the train and that he was right next to her. "WE JUST PASSED THE EIFFEL-FREAKING-TOWER!"

"Please calm down, Nabiki-sama," Ryoga advised her. "We'll be wherever we're going in a few minutes."

"Th-this has happened bef-before?" Nabiki managed. "R-Ranma was t-t-telling the t-truth?"

"They call me the 'Eternally Lost Boy' for a reason," he said morosely.

The train was picking up speed now, flashing in and out of the tunnel at insane speeds. The acceleration was slow enough to be unnoticeable, yet the view out the window was undoubtedly getting faster. Soon, neither of the lost travelers could tell what they were passing by, just registering the images as flashes of white and colour between the flashes of black. Just as Nabiki was somehow becoming _bored_ with the whole experience, the tunnel ended. The train roared out into the open, the landscape perfectly still. Blue stretched from ground to sky, and Ryoga watched out the window curiously as he assessed the situation.

"Interesting," he said finally. "Judging by the speed of the clouds, we've passed the sound barrier a couple minutes ago. I would say that we are now over the Indian Ocean, although I could be wrong. The sun is over there, so we're going… west, I think."

Nabiki didn't have the heart to tell him that they were actually going south. The train blasted over the water for another half hour, and Nabiki spent the time getting to know her boyfriend. The temperature dropped rapidly. The wind started to leak in through the airtight train doors. Ryoga nervously reassessed their situation. "If I'm right, we should be in India right around now…"

There was a grating screech of metal on metal, and the train came to an abrupt stop at the end of… wherever they had gone. The doors opened, and a freezing blast of arctic wind gushed into the train car. Nabiki dug out her parka and pulled it on before heading outside, leading Ryoga by the hand. They emerged from the train onto a windswept platform, a jagged mockery of a Japanese train station with rails that extended only twenty meters beyond the far end of the station before mysteriously ending over the ocean. Snow coated everything that the eye could see, and while Ryoga began howling about Switzerland and Haruna, Nabiki could tell instantly that they were royally screwed. That unmistakeable, blasted landscape meant only one thing...

Somehow, and she had no idea how, they had ended up in Antarctica.

XXX

The ice rink was at least thirty degrees colder than it usually was, and because of it the motley group of martial artists were the only skaters there that day. Akane waved the day passes at a bored looking attendant, and as soon as they pushed past the rink doors she could see her breath crystallizing in the air. Herb began breathing fire, probably without realizing it, the little flames licking at his lips in a vain attempt to warm him up. Ranma laced her skates on sloppily and half-sprinted, half-stumbled out on the ice rink.

"Did we bring extra coats?" Herb asked, his teeth chattering in the cold. Akane shook her head, trying to steady her fingers enough to thread her laces. "I d-didn't think-k it-t-t was g-g-going to b-be this c-c-cold," she stuttered. "M-m-maybe we should go h-home?"

"Wheee!" Ranma shouted, pirouetting high enough to be visible over the sideboard of the arena, and Akane groaned. "I take that as a no then?" Herb joked, finishing with his own skates and standing up. He promptly fell on his face, going from vertical to horizontal without any real provocation, and rolled into a wall. **"Damn!"** he swore. The dragon Musk leaked enough ki to levitate himself to his regular position, and Akane dropped her other skate in awe.

"How are you doing _that_?" she asked, amazed.

"Ki manipulation," he explained, rubbing his head irritably. "Most people only have enough to run their own bodies, but training in the art, or even any athletics, can give you more than enough for a few simply ki blasts. As a dragon, I have far more than I need to run my body, so I can spare some to use in flight."

"Is that why nothing happens when Ranma sucks you dry?" Akane asked.

"Indeed. Ranma is something of a ki vacuum. His pathways have been altered to absorb outside energy. Since I have much more ki than he could ever hope to hold in his body, he simply leaves off before I have lost too much."

"That must be handy."

"GET YOUR HANDS OFFA ME!" Ranma screamed. There was some frantic shuffling on the ice rink, and Herb and Akane rushed to the entrance in time to see Ranma scooped up by a tall girl with long brown hair and a pink spandex outfit. The strange girl, still cooing in a vaguely Kuno-esque fashion over how cute Ranma was, began skating in aimless circles as another person, a man wearing a matching teal green outfit, watched.

"Please put your new companion down," he said in a bored tone. "We _are_ here for a reason."

"Oh, but look at her! She's so adorable!" Ranma probably would have commented again, but Azusa Shiratori had shoved her head in between her breasts, and the venomous reply was drowned out by irony.

"Look, perhaps we can simply do what we came here for, and _then_ you can go off on your silly little tangent," Mikado Sanzenin bit off. "Lord knows we're slipping off our game with these ridiculous little episodes of yours. For the love of the saints, put that child down so we can get on with this."

"Oh, you're just jealous of Esmé, you sorry prick," Azusa said obliviously. "Very well, we may as well do our chores before playing." She abruptly dropped Ranma and skated off, allowing the traumatized girl to suck down a lungful of breath. Herb, still floating a meter or so above the ground, moved over the ice's surface and grabbed Ranma, pulling her back to the edge of the ring. The three watched, fascinated, as the two ice skaters pulled each other into a graceful twirl that started slow, but sped up and became a blur that rocketed around in a circle.

On the third pass, Ranma vanished. The green and pink smear came within inches of where she had been standing, and suddenly she found herself yanked out of Akane's firm grip by the ever-cheerful kleptomaniac (and kidnapper). At the end of the round, Mikado grabbed his partner by the shoulder and threw both her and her unwilling passenger over his shoulder in a perfect judo throw, somehow executed on ice. Azusa didn't even bat an eye as she flipped in midair and landed on her feet, Ranma cradled in her arms like a baby… a violent baby.

Ranma stuffed one hand into her red shirt, feeling around for a five yen coin in her shirt, but Azusa whipped her hand into her pocket and snapped a collar around Ranma's neck with lightning speed. Ranma froze; realizing instantly that using the Happogoensatsu would probably make breathing uncomfortable. Flying into a rage, she spun around completely, managing to dislodged herself from the kleptomaniac's grip, but Azusa kept a hand on her collar. She ended up suspended by her neck in midair, Azusa now regarding her creepily from arm's length.

"May I have my young companion back?" Herb asked politely, allowing himself to fall to the ground and stepping towards the powerful ice skaters. "My friend and I were wondering if we could possibly use the rink, but we decided to wait until you were finished." Akane waved.

"But of course!" Mikado said proudly, plucking the seething Ranma from Azusa's grasp and depositing him on the ground before Akane. The Tendo sister picked Ranma up, willing to risk damaging her ego if it meant protecting her from the manic Azusa. "I do so apologize for the behaviour of my boorish partner," Mikado said. "Do not think of it as a blight upon the reputation of the great Golden Pair."

"Oooh, you're Mikado Sanzenin!" Akane said, her eyes melting into metaphorical chocolate pudding. "I'm your biggest fan!" Mikado bowed from the waist, smiling lecherously. Herb shot Azusa a dark look, who in turn was fuming. She pushed off towards where her erstwhile partner was chatting Akane up like a pro and bopped him on the head, stunning him into inaction while she retrieved 'Esmé' from the blue-haired harlot.

"What the hell was that for?" Akane and Mikado said simultaneously. Azusa stuck her tongue out. "I'm going to take my little Esmé home with me, alright? You two have a grand old time here at the rink, okay? Bye-bye!"

Herb stepped in front of her, spreading his arms. "Do not take my companion with you," he said. "I must ask that you return Ranma Saotome, or face severe consequences."

"You heard him!" Ranma shouted. "Put me down, ya crazy!"

"Make me!" Azusa said petulantly, skating off in the opposite direction with Ranma in tow. Herb looked to Akane for support, but she and Mikado were already deep in conversation. Deciding to handle the situation by himself, Herb dropped to the ground, narrowed his stance, and shot off like a bullet after Azusa. The girl ignored him, still spouting off motherly one-liners at Ranma, until the last instant, when she dropped to the ground and spun like a top, allowing Herb's aerial attack to pass harmlessly over her head.

"Hah!" she taunted. "You'll need to do better than that to beat me!"

Herb snarled and stopped himself, jerking to a halt midair and righting his course towards the irritating skater once more. With a cry of rage, he rushed her again, yet every shot was artfully dodged by Azusa, whose back was turned to him even as she bobbed and weaved in and out of a smattering of punches, ice-skate-bladed kicks, and three ki blasts fueled by confidence, rage, and confusion, in that order. The floating warrior came to a stop, puzzled, and Azusa struck. The curly haired skater pushed herself into a crouch, then leapt off of the rink in a deadly arc that tore a gash in Herb's arm. He fell back from the attack, grabbing at the bleeding cut, and Azusa landed behind him, still holding Ranma.

"W-what? How?"

Azusa smiled dangerously. "Oh, Mikado may be the brains and the looks, but _I_ taught him how to skate. Leave me and Esmé alone! Dance of the Snowbird!"

She spun around, relatively slowly at first, but gathering speed until it appeared to Herb that she was rotating very slowly in the opposite direction. Ranma's tilting face was very, very green, and a shot of something undigested whirled out of the misleading image at supersonic speeds, narrowly missing Herb's head. With a final flourish, Azusa slammed one foot into the ice, abruptly bringing the spin to a halt, but also throwing up a cloud of snow and ice that turned the rink into a foggy deathtrap.

"Soaring Dragon Spirit!" Herb called, arming both palms with balls of ki. He mustered his strength and began flying around the rink as fast as he could, indiscriminately firing into the shadows in the hopes of catching Azusa off guard with a lucky attack. As good as he was, however, Herb's strength was burning out rapidly. With a final shrill scream, he let his flight give way. Unfortunately, the random blasts of energy had fragmented the entire rink into hundreds of pieces, and Herb fell through with a quiet splash. She pulled herself out, scraping her arms and legs on the edge of her chunk of ice, and lay on her back, freezing.

The mist cleared, and Herb had regained enough strength to stand up and look around. Azusa was nowhere to be seen, likewise with Ranma. The unnatural cold of the arena was slowly resealing the rink, and Herb found it safe enough to totter around unsteadily in search of the edge. "Akane!" she cried, looking around desperately. "That crazy bitch just kidnapped Ranma! We gotta go save squirt… Akane? Where are yo-OOF!"

Herb fell over. She landed on her backside, ridges in the ice scoring her butt. Swearing to the heavens, Herb very nearly fell over again as she tried to get back up, but somebody caught her fortuitously as she lost her balance. "My," said Mikado, "are you all right? I just couldn't help but notice that you haven't found your legs on the ice yet."

"Did… did you not see what just happened?" Herb asked in honest confusion.

"Oh, I did, but it happens so much with her that I've stopped paying attention." Mikado smiled charmingly, and Herb fished around for a pleasantry. "Um, thank you for catching me," she said hesitantly, "but I really must be going now."

"Nonsense! I must give you a token of my gratification for having met you, my dear," Mikado insisted.

Akane skated onto the rink, smiling dreamily and giggling. "I just kissed _Mikado Sanzenin_!" she said to herself, blushing profusely. Mikado smiled back at her briefly, and turned again to Herb. "With your lips, I shall have kissed all of one thousand girls!" he said pompously. "Come, let us celebrate such a joyous accomplishment!"

Herb looked at the starstruck Akane and the deluded Mikado, who was already puckering his lips and closing his eyes, and did the only sensible thing. **"WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY!?"** she screamed, shuffling backwards on the ice with her elbows and feet. Mikado popped one eye open at her, and whatever Herb saw in there was enough to give her the strength to run away from the two as fast as she could, terror coursing in her veins.

**Ranma has been kidnapped! Akane has been brainwashed! Herb is suffering from ki exhaustion! Nabiki and Ryoga are stranded at the South Pole! Our unlikely hero is... _who_?**


	12. Interlude II: Unlikely Hero

Kodachi woke up for the morning and dressed in a casual pair of jeans and a t-shirt, trying her frazzled hair back into an approximation of a ponytail, like what a ponytail would look like if one stuck one's finger in an electrical socket. She smiled winningly at the vanity mirror, then opened the top drawer of her dresser to reveal a steel briefcase. She opened it and pocketed a syringe and several vials of multicoloured liquid, wax seals holding the unusual concoctions in place. Now humming merrily, she threw open her walk-in wardrobe, which had been repurposed as an impromptu armory, and grabbed a ribbon and an industrial ice pick off of a rack. She stuffed both of them into her belt.

The Kuno heiress flung her window open and took a minute to survey the family estate. It was larger than she had ever explored yet, and contained a separate gymnasium, greenhouse, servant's quarters, and a sequestered area with palm trees and an artificial lake. The rest was forest, separating the mansion from its surrounding buildings. It was the _other_ lake that interested Kodachi today.

She jumped, ignoring the fact that her bedroom was on the fourth floor, and landed on her feet with a dazzling flourish of the ribbon. It snagged on a package hanging on a peg, and with a snap of her wrist a bag of what appeared to dog food appeared in her hands. She weighted it curiously, measuring how much feed was in her hands with an expert grasp, and decided it was good. Kodachi picked a direction in the foliage and sprinted off like a rocket, her bare feet hitting the earthen floor of the estate with preternatural grace and agility. Branches and vines whipped at her face and arms, but she paid them no mind. A joyous laughter rose over Japan, high and shrill.

XXX

"Oh ho ho ho ho ho!"

Tatewaki Kuno paused in his morning ritual of kendo practice, his bokken hitting the ground as he jerked his head around, frantically searching for the source of the insane cackle.

Sasuke Sarugakure, who was setting out a place at the dining table for Mistress Kuno Sr., shuddered and cursed his karma.

XXX

Kodachi came upon the final log in the familiar route, a massive trunk that had fallen in a storm long before her birth and remained remarkably well preserved. She threw the bag in the air, sunlight glinting off of the reflective surface, and executed a perfect triple backflip over the log. She landed with a slight stumble and threw her arms out for balance, accidentally catching the bag as it fell from the sky. Were anyone else there, she would have claimed that it was intentional, but her audience today most likely didn't care, one way or another.

She had walked into a clearing, which consisted primarily of a sparkling clear pond that had stuck out like a sore thumb to the original builders of the Kuno mansion. It was ringed by a golden stretch of sand, and beyond that grass formed the rest of the area. The near area had a set of parallel bars set on the ground, alongside a punching bag and a trampoline. Though Kodachi's heart belonged to her greenhouse, and the official dojo was back at her house, she preferred to obtain privacy at the home of her beloved pet…

"Mr. Turtle! Momma missed you, yes she did! I have your breakfast here, you big monster you!"

The air hummed, and a flock of birds screeched and took flight from the nearby trees. The surface of the pond rippled, and with no other warning, a black mass erupted from the surface of the pool. The scaly shadow easily cleared the surface, its muscular bulk winging through the air like a wraith. Gravity asserted its hold, and Mr. Turtle, a massive crocodile (and distant relative of the beast who haunted the unfortunate Captain Hook all his life) fell on the beach, kicking up a wave of dirt and sand. He wriggled happily on the beach, and Kodachi beamed. "Who wants some birdy?" she crooned, wrenching open the seal on the bag.

Mr. Turtle roared in delight as the corpses and entrails of dozens of avian prey spilled on the sand, staining the little beach a grotesque red. He lowered his maw to the ground and swallowed the whole meal of offal in two bites. "You're such a good boy, Mr. Turtle, yes you are!" The crocodile grinned endearingly and rolled onto his back, exposing his fleshy white stomach to the heavens. "Oh, does Mr. Turtle want a belly rub?" Kodachi skipped barefoot over the stain of her pet's meal and lightly climbed onto his barrel chest. The animal was easily the weight of a tank, yet as Kodachi began massaging his stomach with the gore-soaked balls of her feet, he started panting like a dog.

It was to this disturbing scene that Sasuke arrived. The ninja manservant alighted on Kodachi's parallel bars and waited as she finished massaging her outrageous pet. A sickening curl of disgust wriggled within his belly, but he crushed it with the memories of every strange thing he'd seen since signing on with the Kuno household. Mr. Turtle's head flopped to the beach, signaling that he'd fallen asleep again, and Kodachi tensed. It was almost invisible to Sasuke, but it was there. Then she flexed her muscles, and disappeared. Sasuke would have reacted with shock, or possibly with dull acceptance, if only he could have moved.

"Well, Sasuke?" demanded Kodachi, removing her dust-covered hand from the back of his neck. "What is it that you've come here to inform me?" Sasuke did nothing. "Silly me," Kodachi murmured, before spying the envelope clutched in his right hand. "For me?" she asked cutely, tugging the paper from his paralyzed grasp. "You shouldn't have…"

She scanned down the contents of the letter with what began as mild confusion and ended in a black fury. "That bitch!" she screamed, her fingers easily shredding the letter into ragged strips. "Who the hell does she think she is?" Although Sasuke couldn't move his eyes, he did catch what appeared to be pinyin on the destroyed paper out the corner of his eye. Then, the remained drifted to the ground, and Kodachi was already off through the forest, murder in her heart.

Truth be told, Sasuke was in _this_ particular scenario, stranded and immobilized without prospect for rescue, far too often for his taste. What made it bearable was that at least this time, it was Kodachi doing it.

XXX

Ranma, after a few minutes of having her face shoved forcefully into Azusa's breasts, passed out from lack of oxygen. Her limp body eventually pulled away from the skater's ample bosom, and so the cursed martial artist didn't die in her embrace. Unconscious, she drifted in the blackness of her mind for an indeterminate amount of time, experiencing herself as both six and sixteen and noticing for the first time that there were little differences inside of her depending on her age. Before she had any more time to consider what it might mean, Ranma awoke.

She was in a room, and that was all she could really tell. There was a ceiling overhead, but walls remained curiously absent. Instead, the structure seemed to be propped up by mountains of things, bits and bobs, odds and ends, flotsam and jetsam, plasma televisions and DSLR camera equipment. When she squinted, Ranma could make out the faint outline of a bright red car, upended on its back bumper, and that _might_ have been near the wall. Then a stuffed animal the size of a bear, though it was actually a unicorn, fell to the floor from even farther away, disabusing her of that notion.

Ranma struggled to her feet and shook her head to clear it of dizziness. She had been stripped while she was out, and was now wearing a red Victorian era ball gown from England. Lace decorations were attached to an equally red skirt, which hung loosely around her legs, and Ranma was dismayed to find herself wearing what appeared to be a solid metal undergarment, similar to a one-piece bathing suit. Chains from the shoulders of the restrictive garment stretched to the red steel collar around her neck.

"Good _morning_! Azusa trilled, even though it was close to lunchtime and both had been awake for several hours. "I see you like the dress I got you, Esmé. Isn't it wonderful? It's from a charming little boutique downtown, and when I saw it I simply _had_ to have it!"

"Of course ya did, ya wacko," Ranma grunted under her breath, and Azusa cheerfully ignored her.

"Azusa loved your collar, but I wasn't sure what to put with it! Then I thought to myself, 'Azusa, don't you remember that handsome young man, Mr. Chardin?' And I said to myself, 'Why certainly, Azusa, don't you? He already had the most stunning name, Picolet. I certainly couldn't do any better if Azusa tried her very hardest!'"

"Stop talking to yourself, _please_!"

"But Azusa very much liked his little undershirt Gautier, so Azusa begged and pleaded with Mr. Chardin, and he gave it to me! So Azusa said that she absolutely, positively _must_ put it with your collar, and she did! But then, you had no clothes on, so Azusa decided that Esmé would look her very best with Prosper on. Do you like my hair?" Azusa leaned forward to show off her hairstyle, but Ranma wasn't looking. She was too busy jabbing at a nerve cluster on Azusa's shoulder, but even with her head down, Azusa dodged backwards with ease from the attacks.

"Azusa thinks we should have a tea party," Azusa decided, flipping her hair back to its proper place atop her empty head. "She shall go and bring the tea, and Esmé can fetch the pot and cups, and _oooh_, Giselle can set up a table!"

A wrinkled old man shifted in a pit of plush toys, signaling that he had heard. Judging by his age and nationality, he had probably lived for a few years in the Soviet Union. As Azusa skipped off, merrily searching out a teapot, the man crawled his way towards Ranma. As she looked closer, she saw that his left leg was strapped into a brace that had been bedazzled and coloured bright pink by crayons. The man reached Ranma's feet, and propelled himself up with one hand to grasp her shirt and pull her face down to his. "Is… no escape," he said in heavily accented Japanese, and turned his head away to unleash a hacking cough. "You… Esmé? I know you not, I not Giselle. Listen, look for door! Way out, back to the motherland! Can-"

He fell over and dry vomited, gagging on his uvula as his stomach tried to empty itself of a poison that wasn't there. Ranma looked around and the pink horror, the white ceiling and marbled floor, and only then did panic start to gnaw at her soul.

XXX

Herb was not a man easily beaten, nor did he often accept surrender or compromise. Herb the woman, however, was much more flexible. In fairness, the dragoness had gone through enough that morning that some might have called his recent life a form of psychological torture, but the assault on her gender was a bit much for the misogynistic leader of the Musk Dynasty. It was hardly true that women were second-class citizens in the empire, much as men were treated in the Nyucheizu village, but the stereotype was deeply ingrained in the royal line of dragons.

Thus, after turning tail to the horrifying Mikado and deranged Akane, Herb had kicked her skates of and run across Nerima barefoot until she couldn't move anymore, at which point fatigue and frostbite started to set in. Raging internally, Herb dragged herself down the street in a stupor as she tried to piece together the succession of events that had torn Ranma from her grasp, and quickly came to the conclusion that the Golden Pair were probably both insane in a fashion that bogged down nearby minds.

The next item on her agenda was to rescue Ranma. That in itself was a multilayered problem, beginning with her own exhaustion and ending with her lack of a starting point. The dragoness hauled herself to the side of the road to think, and for a while it was all she did. Gradually, the same sentence stopped repeating itself in her head, and something from the Art of War emerged. A plan formulated itself, and with a few minutes of shaping the details, Herb had forged something so _un_worthy of her ancestors, they were all rolling in their graves. And also, flattening mountains, because dragons bones tend to be on the large side.

_'Sorry about my gender,'_ she thought mischievously, hoping her ancestors had a sense of humor, and set about looking for a phone book. It was not her shining moment of glory, but it was better than losing squirt to Azusa Shiratori.

XXX

Sasuke finished copying down the message onto a pad of notepaper and ripped the top off. He nodded to the bedraggled lady who'd shown up on the doorstep and set off to find Mistress Kodachi. She was usually outdoors by this hour, but whether she was practicing or playing with her infernal 'pet' was beyond him…

XXX

The fabulously wealthy are attracted to each other like moths to a common flame, so Kodachi was well aware of the location of all other estates of significant value in Nerima. It was a surprisingly long list of locations for such a relatively small ward, but the coincidence passed her by. The Shiratori house, which had made its fortune in the late 1800s by way of mercenary contracts, had commissioned a medieval fortress to be built in what was now Tokyo.

From the outside, it looked dazzling and romantic, but to a real estate agent, a first glance reeked of 'no electricity' and 'unfinished plumbing.' Kodachi, however, had seen firsthand the horrors that lay within the dreadful castle, and it was her pleasure to smoke a rat out of its hole. She leapt brazenly over the cobblestone fence, neatly sidestepping a pendulum axe that swung out of a nearby lamppost and into a well-defined groove in the ground. She nonchalantly hopped over a bear trap chained to a tree, ducked underneath a U-boat grade shark net hanging from a flag pole, and kicked the welcome mat aside to reveal a wooden trap door. The gymnast, careful not to step on the rigged surface, pulled the ice pick out of her belt and whirled it in one hand to get a feel for the weapon. Drawing back, she smashed the sharper end into the door, and was rewarded by a satisfying _thunk_ as it buried itself into the wood.

She repeated the action, each swing bringing the door closer to destruction until all that remained was a collection of splinters hanging from the frame. The castle was breached, and Kodachi stepped warily inside. She glanced around the foyer, which was a large hallway with a vaulted ceiling that reached the breadth of Chateau Shiratori. Just as she began to relax her guard, a feral growl reached her ears. From behind an antique wooden table came two dogs, Doberman by her estimation, and neither leashed. Kodachi reckoned that their handler was probably a safe distance away by now.

"Puppies, puppies," she said condescendingly, reaching into her pocket, "you have no idea what you're getting into… ho ho ho ho ho!"

XXX

Nabiki figured they had spent almost three hours wandering around in a white, freezing hell. The snow's glare was blinding her, although Ryoga seemed strangely immune, and their meager lunch was already half gone. A twisted parody of a subway map had shown the entirety of Antarctica, and a careful study of it revealed to the shrewd woman that the nearest research station was less than a day's walk away. The sun was going down, however, which tore Nabiki between the desire to sleep and to keep going, despite the fact it would be dark.

Ryoga, on the other hand, seemed to be on autopilot as he marched stiffly through the wasteland. He didn't seem to feel any sort of discomfort from the cold, and Nabiki could swear that her boyfriend was almost enjoying himself, regardless of the eldritch circumstances. "What's got you so happy?" she asked suspiciously, and Ryoga smiled slightly.

"My family travels a lot, Nabiki-sama. If we didn't like seeing new sights, I'm sure we would all be locked in madhouses by now. Not that an asylum could hold a Hibiki, and quite a few have tried." He chuckled.

"Why doesn't that surprise me?" Nabiki muttered, checking their direction once again and correcting it by giving Ryoga an eighth of a turn left. His new course set, Ryoga stopped and pointed at something on the horizon. "Those are… alive?" he said, puzzled, and started walking towards the distraction. Nabiki groaned and tried to stop the eternally lost boy, but Ryoga abruptly screamed "Shirokuro! I'm coming buddy!" and sprinting off towards a colony of Emperor Penguins… almost three degrees off course. Nabiki stared at the bizarre sight, repressing the urge to weep in protest of her uncontrollable libido's choice in companion.

"Ryoga, get the hell back here!" she screamed, chasing him into the crowd of penguins.

XXX

The first dog lay on the ground, out for the count after Kodachi bent forward over its slavering bite and bopped it casually on the head barehanded. The other dog was not so lucky, as it was currently engaged in puking its stomach lining out. The pupils of its eyes were wide and shaking in their iris settings as the dog tried to get off the ground while simultaneously keeping its lunch down, but it failed at both. Kodachi looked curiously at the dog, then at the half full syringe in her hand. She made a mental note to go easy on compound C-121 in the future.

She stealthily invaded the mansion, only occasionally having to hide from a servant or Shiratori, until she arrived at another door. This one was large, taking up an entire dead end of a hallway and dramatically shrouded in chains and shinto wards against evil spirits. A faint pink glow oozed from the cold iron, which was suppressed by the healthy dose of sealing magic present at the gateway to… wherever it was that Herb claimed Ranma was.

She dropped from the ceiling, ice pick in one hand and ribbon in the other, and circumvented the locked passage entirely by smashing a new doorway in the wall, Shampoo-style. Kodachi was prepared to vanish as soon as she got through, but the sight of so much contraband stopped her dead in her tracks. The room clearly did not obey the laws of physics, as evidenced by a- holy shit, is that a _Ferrari_?- balanced on a coffee table, in turn suspended above the ground by fishing line in a complicated spider web. A noise shattered the gymnast's reverie, and Kodachi found the sense to hide behind a European suit of armor juxtaposed with a shogun's lacquered armor.

Kuno peeped out from between the gaps in a metal greave at Azusa, wearing a pair of inline rollerblades and a white skirt and dress that made her look like a nurse in the most lax hospice in the world. She slashed herself to a stop in front of an oven, which had been set in the middle of the room with no apparent gas main or power cord connected, and pulled off a pot of boiling water. The skater poured the kettle's contents into a teapot, added a tea bag, and disappeared again into the labyrinth of her conquests.

Kodachi smirked. She could easily defeat Azusa in single combat, even fighting as fairly as her opponents professed to, but there was a much more easy and- if she were being honest- fun way to go about doing so. The gymnast quickly located a pillar that reached to the ceiling, scaled it with a monkey's agility, and secured her tools in her belt loops as she prepared to scurry along the ceiling like a spider.

XXX

Ranma wasn't all there as she participated in the unholy ceremony between a kidnapping sociopath, a Soviet defector, and a gender-cursed, age-defying martial artist at a low table in a room that didn't seem to follow the rules that the world had adhered to for most of her life. Azusa was talking and laughing and chatting up 'Giselle' and 'Oscar,' a panda who looked happy enough with a bamboo shoot in his greedy claws, but Ranma didn't hear it. All she could register was the steadily accelerating sound of her blood pounding in her ears; all she could feel was the sweat streaming from her palms and into her lap, slicking the teacup. She dragged the cup to her lips unsteadily, her shaking arm spilling nearly half the drink on her dress as she tried to down the rest of her Sencha.

Suddenly, Azusa grabbed her throat, making desperate choking noises as she fell facefirst into the table, shaking and jerking about but gradually slowing to the pace of a deep sleeper. 'Giselle' stood up and checked Azusa's pulse, making sure that the kleptomaniac still lived, and Oscar went on obliviously munching his snack, but Ranma wasn't there.

All she could see was the nosebleed-inducing assets of Kodachi Kuno, who was holding on to her desperately and already directing the sad little party to the exit of the room. And for once, she was glad to be there.

**This chapter dedicated to Dumbledork, who I hope approves of my portrayal of Kodachi Kuno.**


	13. Precocious

**Now, to introduce the next segment of madness…**

* * *

_In the past…_

* * *

Grandmaster Happosai, after returning the protégé to his lousy, ingrate disciple, spent the next week in a state of intoxication, absorbing as much female ki as he could for his coming challenge. In the earliest part of his life that he could remember, his greatest foe, his own personal Everest, was to see the unclothed beauty of Cologne. She radiated youthful energy at an astounding rate, and even if her fires had faded over the term of his imprisonment, it was a worth challenge for a pervert of his stature and reputation.

Almost as soon as he stepped into the first brothel, he set to work at refining his ki drain ability, working it subtly into a full-on stunning effect for the fairer sex. He cackled with delight, zooming around and freezing busty women in various states of nudity for his viewing (and touching) pleasure. As he ran from breast to breast, he was pleased to see that minute shudders of revulsion still escaped from the horrified girls. Immensely pleased, Happosai devoted another few days to training in the Art, then set out for China.

He declined to travel by boat or plane, deciding instead to swim the breadth of the Sea of Japan to the eastern coast of China. There, he celebrated the first leg of his journey by getting in a few barroom brawls and molesting a woman or two. In fact, that was how he celebrated _every_ leg of the journey, province to province and town to town across China, until he arrived at the base of the southernmost mountain. The short man in the blue gi looked up, sunlight reflecting off of his bald dome, and whistled at the sheer height of the cliffs.

He then proceeded to hop from crag to rocky spur with the aped and sureness of a mountain goat, amplified by decades of practice. Happosai reached the top of the cliffs in record time without even breaking a sweat, lustful anticipation already leaking into the gleam in his eyes, when a woman's cry shattered the mountain stillness. A shred of human decency still living in the grandmaster of Anything Goes propelled Happosai off in a different direction than the Amazon village. He leapt gracefully across the mountaintops, the distress of his favourite prey somehow spurring him on faster.

Happosai found the source of the shrieking at Jusenkyo springs. It was a bit of a surprise, although it probably shouldn't have been. Destiny was forged in this cursed place, he'd won enough duels atop the ancient bamboo shoots to know that. The woman in pain was nine months pregnant, and obviously giving birth. The same altruistic side to him that had emerged during Ranma's training came to the forefront again, and Happosai dashed in to help.

The next few minutes were filled with pain for all three parties involved.

The baby was a healthy young boy, which meant that Happosai was marginally less dangerous to him than if he'd been born a girl. The woman, however, was less healthy than her new son. She had lost a great deal of blood giving birth, and it was Happosai's expert opinion that she wouldn't live for very much longer. He regarded her sadly, and gave her son to her. The woman cradled her baby to her chest, both of them crying.

"… thank you for saving him," she said faintly.

"It was my duty," Happosai observed stoically, choking on unfamiliar emotions. "You're welcome."

"I want you to bathe and name my son," the woman said, just as faintly, but now with a desperate slowness to her tone. Happosai reached out and took the young boy from his mother's arms, and she breathed her last. The old letch satisfied himself with a single necrophilic grope, then turned to more important matters.

"What to name you?" he murmured, holding the baby up at arms length. The crying was gradually slowing. "You could be great, little one. I shall give you a name to help you on your way to greatness!" The baby gurgled. "I want to give unto you a name that is worthy of the ancient kings! You shall be…"

The birds stopped chirping, and clouds seemed to freeze in the sky. The Jusenkyo guide felt as though someone had stepped on his grave.

"Pantyhose Taro!" Happosai exclaimed enthusiastically. Pantyhose Taro laughed merrily and waved his arms around, delighting Happosai. "Now, where to bathe you?"

Happosai selected a large spring in the centre of the collection of cursed pools, nimbly weaving in and around the pitfalls on either side. The murky depths of the pool seemed entrancing to the old martial artist, but he steeled his mind against the magic's lure and, holding Taro by the heel of one foot, submerged him in the pool. There was a flash of whiteness, and Happosai stumbled back in shock as he saw that Pantyhose had become a… well, a monster. The baby looked rather like a minotaur, with a bulls' head and legs and a humanoid body and arms, comically resized to baby format. A pair of white wings spread from his shoulder blades, and the base of his spine had a distended tailbone that lengthened into an eel, mature but also shrunken to fit his small frame.

The newly forged monster landed flat on his face and started crying, sounding more like a jet engine preparing for takeoff than a newborn baby. Happosai approached, Taro, but the wailing as he got closer increased by dozens of decibels, to the point that the sound was pushing him backwards in the dirt, dangerously approaching the Spring of Drowned Good Samaritan. Not that Happosai could have known that, but his self-preservation sense tingled quickly enough to rob the world at large of _that_ hope.

"Be quiet, pup," Happosai grumbled, steeling himself to approach his newest charge once again, but both monster and pervert were distracted by yet another woman wailing in pain, dragging herself between two of the springs. She looked to be younger than twenty, and was dressed conservatively, suggesting that she was from the more civilized areas of China. She came to rest not far away from the pair and immediately went into labour, something that Happosai would never have recognized had it not happened less than five minutes ago. Feeling a bit awkward, he approached the woman.

"May I be of assistance?" he asked politely. The woman shook her head, and Happosai stepped back respectfully. Another intensely awkward period passed, and now _another_ woman had given birth at Jusenkyo, this time to an equally healthy young girl. The baby didn't cry as she entered the world, she just looked around with wide eyes full of wonderment.

"Hello," the new mother said amicably, cradling her baby. "What might I call you?"

"Err, that's not important," Happosai demurred, hoping to steer the conversation to a more favourable avenue. "Might I ask of you a favour?"

"I suppose there's no harm in asking," the woman allowed.

"You see," said Happosai gratefully, "you are the second mother here in a few short minutes, but the first was not quite so lucky." He pointed distastefully at the emaciated and blood-splattered corpse of Pantyhose Taro's mother. "I realize that this may be a bit of a burden on you, but it would be convenient if you looked after her son."

The woman smiled warmly. "Oh, a boy? Where is he? My little Rouge will have a new friend!"

Happosai pointed mutely at Taro, the tiny monster rolling on the ground and strangling his own tail. The new mother scrambled to her feet, placing Rouge on the ground, and fumbled in her pocket for something. "Pretty Angel Water, Make Up!" she shouted, and Happosai was treated to another lovely naked transformation sequence. When the magic cleared, Pretty Angle Water was pointing a massive sword at Pantyhose, her entire body glimmering with power.

"Put that down," Happosai said, easily snatching the broadsword away from Water with practiced ease. The magical girl mother looked vaguely surprised, but said nothing. "That's a curse," Happosai said. "If you pour cold water on a Jusenkyo victim, they transform, and hot water transforms them back. He's human, I assure you."

"Be that as it may, I have reservations against allowing youma in my household," Pretty Angel Water declared. "I wish to see proof of this so-called 'curse.'"

"This way," Happosai said, and walked to the Jusenkyo guide's hut. Water followed, leaving Rouge behind. The tiny old man reached up and knocked on the door, and was answered by the disheveled guide. **"How can I help you?"** he grunted. Happosai darted in, grabbed a kettle of water, and slammed the door in the man's face.

They returned to the springs themselves, and Water decided to see if what Happosai had said was true. She extended her senses belowground, searching out magical impurities, and was surprised to find that Jusenkyo Springs was brighter than a shining star to her magic-detection.

"That… that is not good," Happosai stated flatly. Pantyhose Taro had picked up Rouge and thrown her headfirst into a spring. Pretty Angel Water stared at it, stunned into disbelief. Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then the surface of the water was broken by a tiny floating figure. The neo-Asura demon reached up to her head, cracked it both ways, and blinked. Four times. "Well, this is certainly a new experience," the main face commented in perfect Japanese.

"Whatever, I just wanna get some hot water and go back," said the second.

"I vote we kick this minotaur's ass!" screamed the third.

"I must say, that seems like a fairly straightforward course of action. We do have fire now," said the fourth.

Asura held out all six arms, which had torn her shirt off, and began to throw small balls of fire at the fledgling before her, who made a noise of delight and lifted off the ground to join her. "Oh gross, it's slobbering on me," said the fourth head. Asura punted Taro off of her again, narrowly missing the pool she'd emerged from with her aim, and resumed pelting him with a firestorm. Pretty Angel Water's mouth fell open in sheer disbelief.

Happosai lit up a pipe and took a drag, the beginning of a smile tugging on his lips. "Wow, they sure do grow up fast," he commented, as Pantyhose Taro grabbed Asura by the ankle and smashed her into the ground. Hindu demons, practically being made of rubber, were liable to bounce back, and Asura did so with a feral growl on two faces, a vacant expression on another, and yet another that was still talking.

"We really ought to be done with this cretin in just a few seconds, and then we can get some milk from mom."

"All four of us?"

"I'm not sure that's feasible…"

Pretty Angel Water had a small breakdown. "ROUGE! SMALL… YETI-DEMON-BABY!" she screamed. "STOP THAT RIGHT THIS INSTANT!" Asura respectfully returned to the ground, bowing her head contritely. "I'm sorry," all four of her heads said, the third less than sincerely. Pantyhose Taro grunted something in Tauren that translated roughly to 'I apologize, respected elder.'

"YOU! THIS IS YOUR PROBLEM, YOU WEIRD LITTLE SHRIMP! DO SOMEHTING ABOUT MY DAUGHTER!" Pretty Angel Water rounded on Happosai, but the grandmaster martial artist was already leaping over the cliffs surrounding the springs, giggling like a little girl. "So long, sucker!" he roared, and then he was gone.

"…"

"Mother, is something the matter?" chorused all four voices.

**'Grunt'.**

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHH!"

* * *

_In the present, or something like it…_

* * *

"Oh, the shame, Saotome!"

"Indeed, Tendo. Now our schools will never be joined! We must convince our ungrateful offspring of the error of their ways!"

"I concur, old friend. Say, Kuonji, bring us another keg of beer, would you?"

Ukyo Kuonji stepped into the back room of the Ucchan, whipped open a minifridge, and tossed a wooden vessel of beer to the inebriate fathers. Customers on either side moved over one seat in disgust. Ukyo sighed, wishing that Ranchan's parents were less of a blight on humanity. She _deserved_ better parents to go with her fiancé! "Konatsu, could you go buy some more shrimp at the store?"

"Mistress Ukyo, isn't the grocery market closed?" asked the transgender waitress.

"It's only four, Konatsu. The sun's still up."

"Of course, Mistress Ukyo!" The smiling kunoichi stepped outside, hoisted his skirt up (don't ask, don't tell) and jumped to the roof. With him out of the way, Ukyo was free to 'deal' with Genma and Soun however she pleased. "Listen up, jackasses, this is the final straw," she growled, unsheathing a massive battle spatula.

"I am sick and tired of your antics, and now you have the _gall_ to come into my restaurant and bitch about your son marrying Akane? In front of me, his _other_ fiancée? When anyone with eyes in their heads can see that they _don't love each other?_ You two better get the hell out of my restaurant, or there will be serious ass-kicking in about three seconds!"

"You best respect your elders, Kuonji whelp," Genma said drunkenly, standing up slowly. "Ranma an' Akane are in love, an' my son owes you nothin', ungrateful brat." He sulked. "Iss' all your father's fault, the bastard. He-"

Ukyo belted him into a wall. Soun got to his feet as fast as he could, and the rest of the restaurant cleared out fast. Nerima brawls were the stuff of legend, and nobody wanted to get between the infamous 'cute fiancée' and the target of her ire. Genma tried to get back up, but Ukyo smashed her spatula into his face again, this time drawing blood with the flat of her family's ancestral weapon. Genma moaned in pain and collapsed.

"You want some too?" Ukyo demanded of Soun, who was crying and backed into a corner. The man opened his mouth to bawl assorted cowardice, when the windows of the Ucchan blew inward with a sonic screech. The ragtag crew of offenders were Ryoga Hibiki and Mousse, who were already engaged in combat, and Tatewaki Kuno, who had nudged the fight ever so slightly towards her okonomiyaki bar. The result was that the madmen fighters made a subconscious beeline towards the establishment.

"Ay, the Blue Thunder of Furinkan High is here!" Kuno said over the din. Ryoga punched Mousse in the gut and brought his hand away bleeding, having punched a weapon through the folds of the Chinese boy's robe. "You, vile succubus, are the proponent of my honourless rival Saotome. Prithee, has the sorcerer hidden himself in your place of business, for if it is so, I shall have no choice but to purify this den of sin and gluttony in flames."

Ukyo's mouth fell open.

Mousse's left ear fell off, victim of Ryoga's ballistic bandana shots.

The sound went dramatically mute.

Nabiki Tendo assured herself that all the yen was there, and congratulated herself on another successful scam of Tatewaki Kuno.

Konatsu paid for the shrimp, then went back for a bag of milk and bought that too. Stealing was part of the kunoichi art, but Mistress Ukyo had impressed upon him that it was considered rude and improper not to pay when one could afford it. He stowed the food in his voluminous robes and took to the skies once again. Once upon a time, it would have frightened the civilians below, but nowadays nobody in Nerima even batted an eye. It was par for the course, ever since Ranma had taught Mousse how to run up walls.

He ran along the building, thinking about the tea Nodoka Saotome had offered him the next afternoon. _Would a kimono be too formal?'_ he wondered, not really looking where he was going. He was so lost in thought that he didn't see the raging wall of fire that erupted before him until his skin began to warm. Even then, he still almost ran into the flames, so entranced was he by the fire. Konatsu had a thing for burning… anything, really.

"That… that's the Ucchan!" he shouted in a panic, the lives of everyone inside flashing before his eyes. _'Ukyo-sama!'_

Then, the world went blank. Darkness washed over him in a wave of drowsiness, and Konatsu didn't have enough fight in him to ward off oblivion. He felt himself collapse, and sleep for some time. When he awoke, there was something wrong…

"Konatsu! Wake the hell up!" somebody shouted. He groaned and pushed himself off the ground, idly rubbing his backside, when he froze in a panic. The kunoichi wasn't wearing the Ucchan's uniform anymore, because the cloth felt more like his old ninja outfit, which he had definitely not fallen asleep in.

_'Fall asleep? What just happened?'_ he thought. For some reason, the fiery destruction of his beloved restaurant was the furthest thing from his mind, which terrified him moreso than the actual event. Someone, or something, was messing with him, and Konatsu was determined to find out. Suddenly, the door to the room he had been sleeping in burst open, and in came a morbidly obese woman dressed like a whore, waving about a dirty pair of men's boxers.

"… Kotetsu?" Konatsu said incredulously. "What-"

"Get your lazy ass downstairs and start working on breakfast!" the vile woman shouted. "We open in an hour, moron!"

"What the-" Konatsu began, but Kotetsu slammed the door closed and left in a huff. Sighing in wonderment, Konatsu sat back on the bed, realizing where he was: his old room in the attic of the Red Hot Teahouse Kunoichi. _'But this place went out of business, and my family all moved to Kyoto. What's going on?'_

"Kage Bunshin no Jutsu," he murmured, and three copies of the ninja appeared in the room around him. "Spread out and figure out what happened," Konatsu ordered, and the clones sped off in different directions: one out the door, one through the window, and the third simply disappearing. Konatsu waited patiently for a few minutes, until the clones dispersed themselves, and the memories they returned to him confirmed what he'd already suspected: Konatsu had been teleported back in time.

The news stunned him at first, but then he started to giggle effeminately, and soon Konatsu was rolling on the ground in fits of hysteria. _'I would have never seen this happening to me! ME!'_ he thought to himself, and as the laughter died down, an evil smile pasted itself on his face. There was so much to do, and if his second clone was right, very little time in which to do it.

XXX

From far away, one could faintly make out the screamed "Gokakyu no Jutsu!". But far more evident was the mushroom of fire and subsequent pillar of smoke that wafted away from the Red Hot Teahouse Kunoichi. A high, mad laughter drifted over the forest, travelling towards Tokyo at speed. Far away, Kodachi sneezed. And Konatsu was back in the game.

* * *

_Back where we think we were..._

* * *

Pretty Angel Water deactivated her powers, reverting to a normal Japanese teenager. With a titanic effort, she refrained from swearing in front of her charges, and instead gestured with a finger for Pantyhose Taro and her daughter to come forward. The Jusenkyo guide handed her a bucket of hot water, and a quick splash turned both back into squalling infants, completely unaware of what had just transpired.

"This one's village not far away," the guide suggested, pointing to a small drift of campfire smoke off in the mountains. The girl stared at it for a minute, her eyebrows twitching, and then she bit her elbow and swore into her sleeve for a solid minute, the guide waiting patiently.

"No," she said, releasing her arm. "I will _not_ be going there. You people here are crazy! I'm taking my daughter and this, this _thing_ back to Nerima with me. And anybody who argues with me, is gonna get a kick in the-"

"I not want to stop you!" the man yelped, backing up hesitantly. "You go, not come back, make me happy!"

She gave him a droll look, and bent over to collect her new children. She had brought a baby carrier to China in anticipation of Rouge's birth, but Taro was a slightly more awkward affair. In the end, she put the male next to her daughter, the two babies squished together uncomfortably in the basket.

As she turned to leave, the guide said, "Wait!"

"What."

He hesitated. "Er, his name," he explained. "It's Taro…"

"Taro… What's his first name?"

The guide was sweating profusely, torn between tradition and the desire to not be hit into the ground. Self-preservation won. "I not know," he lied, having perfectly well heard Happosai naming him. "You make it up."

"That's what I thought you said."

**I'm sorry if this is a little weird, but I need to speed up the plot a bit. Is Pretty Angel a good name for a team of magical girls?**


End file.
